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The  Peril  and  the  Preservation  of 
the  Home 


The  Peril  and  the 
Preservation  of  the  Home 


Being  the  William  L.  Bull 
Lectures  for  the  Year  1903 


By 
JACOB  A.  RIIS 

Author  of  "The  Making  of  an  American,"  "The  Battle 
with  the  Slum"  etc. 


PHILADELPHIA 

GEORGE  W.  JACOBS  &  CO. 

PUBLISHERS 


Copyright,  1903,  by 

George  W.  Jacobs  &  Company, 

Published  May,  1903 

SOCHL 


(puiuL(, 


The  Letter  Establishing  the  Lectureship       SOCIAL 

WELFARE 

For  many  years,  it  has  been  my  earnest  desire  to  found  a  Lee-  LIBRARY 
turesJiip  on  Christian  Sociology,  meaning  thereby  the  application 
of  Christian  principles  to  the  social,  industrial,  and  economic 
problems  of  the  time,  in  my  alma  mater,  the  Philadelphia  Divinity 
School.  My  object  In  founding  this  Lectureship  is  to  secure  the 
free,  frank,  and  full  consideration  of  these  subjects  with  special 
reference  to  the  Christian  aspects  of  the  questions  involved,  which 
have  heretofore,  in  my  opinion,  been  too  much  neglected  in  such 
discussion.  It  would  seem  that  the  time  is  now  ripe  and  the 
moment  an  auspicious  one  for  the  establishment  of  this  Lecture- 
ship, at  least  tentatively. 

I  therefore  make  the  following  offer  to  continue  for  at  least  a 
period  of  three  years,  with  the  hope  that  these  lectures  may  excite 
such  an  interest,  particularly  among  the  undergraduates  of  the 
Divinity  School,  that  I  shall  be  justified,  with  the  approval  of  the 
authorities  of  the  Divinity  School,  in  placing  the  Lectureship  on 
a  more  permanent  foundation. 

I  herewith  pledge  myself  to  contribute  the  sum  of  six  hundred 
dollars  annually,  for  a  period  of  three  years,  to  the  payment  of  a 
lecturer  on  Christian  Sociology,  whose  duty  it  shall  be  to  deliver 
a  course  of  not  less  than  four  lectures  to  the  students  of  the  Di- 
vinity School,  either  at  the  school  or  elsewhere,  as  may  be  deemed 
most  advisable,  on  the  application  of  Christian  principles  to  the 
social,  industrial,  and  economic  problems  and  needs  of  the  times ; 
the  said  lecturer  to  be  appointed  annually  by  a  committee  of  five 
members :  the  Bishop  of  the  Diocese  of  Pennsylvania ;  the  Dean  of 
the  Divinity  School ;  a  member  of  the  Board  of  Overseers ;  and 
two  of  the  Associate  Alumni,  one  of  whom  shall  be  chosen  by  the 
Alumni  Association,  and  the  other  to  be  myself. 

Furthermore,  If  It  shall  be  deemed  desirable  that  the  lectures 
shall  be  published,  I  pledge  myself  to  the  additional  payment  of 
from  one  to  two  hundred  dollars  for  such  purpose. 

To  secure  the  full,  frank,  and  free  consideration  of  the  ques- 
tions involved.  It  is  my  desire  that  the  opportunity  shall  be  given 
from  time  to  time  to  the  representatives  of  each  school  of 
economic  thought  to  express  their  views  in  these  lectures. 

The  only  restriction  I  wish  placed  on  the  lecturer  is  that  he 
shall  be  a  believer  in  the  moral  teachings  and  principles  of  the 
Christian  reUgion  as  the  true  solvent  of  our  social,  industrial,  and 
economic  problems.  Of  course,  it  Is  my  Intention  that  a  new 
lecturer  shall  be  appointed  by  the  committee  each  year,  who  shall 
deliver  the  course  of  lectures  for  the  ensuing  year. 

WILLIAM  L.  BULL. 
All  Saints'  Cathedral, 
Spokane,  Washington, 
January  1, 1901. 


The  Committee 


0.  W.  Whitakeb, 

Bishop  of  the  Diocese  of  Pennsylvania. 
"William  M.  Geoton, 

Dean  of  the  Philadelphia  Divinity  School. 
J.  DeWolf  Pebbt, 
Ltman  p.  Powell, 
.  WiLLUM  L.  Bull. 


506 


Contents 

I.    Our  Sins  in  the  Past     ....  11 

II.    Our  Fight  for  the  Home  ...  65 

III.  OuK  Plight  in  the  Present  .    .  117 

IV.  Our  Grip  on  the  To-morrow  .    .  155 


List  of  Illustrations 


LECTURE  II 

At  the  Old  Five  Points Facing 

The  "Old  Church  Tenements" " 

Gotham  Court " 

Midnight  in  Gotham  Court " 

The  Alderman's  Tenements " 

Little  Susie     " 

Tenement  Where  a  Home  was  Murdered  ...  " 

A  "Drunken"  Flat " 

In  a  Baxter  Street  Yard " 

Shanty  Dwellings  in  a  Tenement  Yard  .   ...  " 
Washing  in  an   Italian  Flat;  the  Tea  Kettle 

Used  as  a  Wash  Boiler " 

Pietro  and  his  Father " 

Sister  Irene  and  her  Little  Ones " 

The  Open  Trench  in  the  Potter's  Field  .    ...  " 
"The  Way  Out  "—Bedtime  in  the  Five  Points 

House  of  Industry  Nursery ' 

LECTURE  III 

A  Typical  Tenement  House  Block " 

The  Only  Bathtub  in  the  Block " 

The  Riverside  Tenements " 

Lodgers  at  "  Five  Cents  a  Spot " *' 

They  "  Lived  Nowhere  " " 

Joining  "  the  Club  " " 

9 


Page 

90 

92 

94 

94 

96 

98 

100 

102 

104 

104 

106 

108 

110 

112 

114 


126 
128 
130 
132 
136 
138 


lO 


List  of  Illustrations 


Hell  on  Earth Facing  Page  140 

The    City  and    Suburban  Homes  Company's 
Model  Tenements;   The  Alfred  Corning 


Clark  Block 

The  "  To-morrow  " 

It  is  Five  Years  Since  the  Bend  Became  a  Park. 

In  the  Public  School  of  To-day 

Saluting  the  Flag 


142 
144 
146 
150 
152 


I 

OUR  SINS  IN  THE  PAST 


OUR   SINS   IN   THE   PAST 

At  the  very  outset  of  my  discussion  of 
the  peril  and  the  preservation  of  the  Amer- 
ican home,  I  am  confronted  with  an  appar- 
ent contradiction  that  would  seem  to  deny 
my  premises,  my  contention  that  upon  the 
preservation  of  the  home  depends  the  vital- 
ity of  our  Republic ;  that,  if  the  home 
were  gone,  we  should  be  fighting  against 
overwhelming  odds  in  the  battle  to  main- 
tain it  and  would  as  surely  lose.  But  I 
think  you  will  find  that  the  contradiction 
is  only  apparent.  I  refer  to  the  fact — let 
me  state  it  right  here  and  have  the  enemy 
all  in  front,  I  like  it  that  way — that, 
whereas  in  my  own  great  city  I  attribute 
to  our  unhappy  housing  conditions  (those 
conditions  which  have  given  to  New  York 
the  bad  name  of  "  the  homeless  city,")  most 

13 


14  Oar  Stns  in  the  Past 

of  the  troubles  that  have  made  our  munici- 
pal government  a  by-word  in  the  past  and 
raised  doubts  in  the  minds  of  some  as  to 
the  fitness  of  our  people,  of  any  people,  to 
govern  themselves  rightly  ;  yet  in  this  city 
of  yours  to  which  I  have  come  to  make  the 
arraignment,  the  one  among  all  our  great 
communities  that  has  the  distinction  of 
having  preserved  the  home  ideal  most 
nearly,  you  are,  as  far  as  any  one  can  make 
out,  no  better  off  than  we.  It  has  some- 
times seemed  that  you  were  even  worse  off. 
You  have  your  fight,  as  we  have  ours.  But 
do  not  let  it  discourage  you  if,  for  the  time 
being,  you  are  outnumbered.  The  point  is 
that  there  are  more  to  help  every  time. 
Looking  back  now  on  the  many  battles  in 
my  city,  I  can  see  that  every  defeat  we  suf- 
fered was  really  a  victory ;  it  showed  us 
how  to  do  better  next  time.  So  is  defeat 
always  gain  in  the  cause  of  right,  if  we 
would  only  see  it.  We  grow  to  the  stature 
of  men  under  it.  Is  it  not,  when  it  comes 
to  that,  just  a  question  whether  you  believe 


Oar  Sins  in  the  Past  15 

firmly  enough  in  your  own  cause  ?  Faith 
can  move  mountains  of  indifference,  even 
here  in  Pennsylvania. 

I  said  it  seemed  a  contradiction,  and  yet 
only  seemed  so.  It  is  because  I  am  sure 
your  sufferings  have  been  in  spite  of  your 
homes,  not  because  of  any  lacJc  of  them. 
Standing  the  other  day  on  a  mountain-side 
in  New  Hampshire,  with  a  matchless  view 
stretching  out  before  me,  I  said  to  my 
friend,  the  good  rector  and  faithful  pastor 
of  the  parish :  "  Here  everybody  must 
surely  be  good.     How  can  they  help  it?  " 

He  looked  at  me  sadly  and  said,  pointing 
to  the  scattered  farms  lying  so  peacefully  in 
the  landscape  :  "  If  you  could  go  with  me 
into  those  homes  and  see  the  things  I  see  in 
too  many  of  them  you  would  quit  your 
Mulberry  Bend  and  transfer  your  battle 
with  the  slum  to  our  hillsides." 

I  think,  if  you  will  permit  me  to  say  it, 
that  your  great  and  splendid  city  has  been 
I  am  almost  tempted  to  say  pauperized  in 
its  citizenship  by  great  wealth  and  perilous 


i6  Oar  Sins  in  the  Past 

prosperity ;  by  a  pampered  prosperity  that 
is  not  good  for  anybody  in  the  long  run. 
However,  that  is  politics,  which  I  shall  not 
discuss.  The  President  of  the  United  States 
says  that  my  opinion  in  that  quarter  is 
no  good  at  all,  and  you  are  free  to  adopt 
his  view.  I  will  endorse  his  views — most 
of  them — anywhere.  I  seek  in  mine  an 
explanation  of  the  civic  apathy  that  has 
betrayed  your  town,  as  it  has  mine,  into  the 
grasp  of  a  boss  and  of  boss  politics.  It  may 
be  that  I  am  mistaken.  It  may  be  that  I 
put  too  much  of  the  blame  on  the  piggeries. 
I  used  to  say  that  a  man  cannot  be  expected 
to  live  like  a  pig  and  vote  like  a  man,  and 
I  had  reference  to  the  tenements,  some  of 
which  surely  deserve  to  be  called  by  no 
other  name.  I  was  very  sure  of  my  ground 
until  the  industrial  troubles  of  the  last 
summer  seemed  to  cut  it  partly  from  under 
me ;  for  then  I  had  people  who  were  well- 
to-do,  educated,  and  who  ought  to  know 
better,  right  in  my  own  town,  come  and  up- 
braid me  for  always  fighting  the  battle  with 


Our  Sins  in  the  Past  17 

the  slum.  "  What  is  the  use  ?  "  they  said  ; 
"  they  won't  be  content."  Since  that  time 
I  have  thought  that  perhaps  there  may  be 
pigs  in  parlors,  too.  No,  thank  God,  they 
will  not  be  content.  Let  me  say  right  here, 
so  that  we  may  understand  one  another, 
that  the  whole  of  my  manhood's  life  has 
been  given  and  what  remains  of  it  will  be 
given,  please  God,  to  fighting  the  things, 
all  of  them,  that  go  to  debase  and  degrade 
manhood  and  womanhood ;  so  I  under- 
stand a  Christian's  duty. 

In  that  I  know  I  have  not  erred.  If  I 
have  laid  too  much  stress  on  the  piggeries, 
it  but  proves  that  the  peril  of  the  home  is 
not  the  only  one  that  besets  our  Republic, 
and  that  we  need  be  up  and  doing.  But 
still  I  believe  that  the  home  is  the  main- 
stay ;  that  it  rather  proves  the  home  to  be 
beset  with  perils  not  in  the  cities  only. 
All  the  more  am  I  convinced  that  around 
it  only  can  the  fight  be  waged  successfully  ; 
and  I  have  full  faith  that  just  because  you 
have  preserved  the  home  better  than  have 


i8  Oar  Sms  in  the  Past 

we,  when  the  day  of  waking  comes,  you  will 
throw  off  the  nightmare  that  has  plagued 
your  dreams  with  such  a  jolt  as  will  warn 
it  off  for  good  and  all  and  tempt  it  to  re- 
turn no  more.  Of  that  I  am  sure.  God 
speed  you  in  the  fight ! 

I  shall  not  in  this  place  have  to  enter 
into  a  protracted  argument  to  prove  that 
the  home  is  the  pivot  of  all  and  why  it  is 
so.  We  know  that  it  is  so,  that  it  has  been 
so  in  all  ages  ;  that  the  home-loving  peoples 
have  been  the  strong  peoples  in  all  time, 
those  that  have  left  a  lasting  impression  on 
the  world.  Stable  government  is  but  the 
protection  the  law  throws  around  the  home, 
and  the  law  itself  is  the  outgrowth  of  the 
effort  to  preserve  it.  The  Romans,  whose 
heirs  we  are  in  most  matters  pertaining  to 
the  larger  community  life,  and  whose  law 
our  courts  are  expounding  yet,  set  their 
altars  and  their  firesides  together, — pro  aris 
et  pro  foces;  and  their  holiest  oaths  were 
by  their  household  gods.  I  have  always 
thought    that    in    that    lay    the   secret  of 


Oar  Stns  in  the  Past  19 

their  strength,  and  that  in  the  separa- 
tion of  the  fireside  and  the  altar  lies 
the  great  peril  of  our  day.  When  for  the 
fireside  we  got  a  hole  in  the  floor  and  a  hot 
air  register,  we  lost  not  only  the  lodestone 
that  drew  the  scattered  members  of  the 
family  to  a  common  focus,  but  with  it  went 
too  often  the  old  and  holy  sense  of  home  : 
"I  and  my  house,  we  will  serve  the  Lord." 
Rome  perished  when  most  of  her  people 
became  propertyless — homeless.  Whenever 
I  think  of  it  there  comes  to  my  mind  a 
significant  passage  in  the  testimony  of  the 
secretary  of  the  Prison  Association  in  my 
city  before  a  legislative  committee  ap- 
pointed to  investigate  the  draft  riots  of 
1863.  The  mob,  he  said,  came,  as  did  eighty 
per  cent,  of  the  crime  in  the  metropolis, 
from  the  element  in  the  population  "  whose 
homes  had  ceased  to  be  sufficiently  sepa- 
rate, decent  and  desirable  to  afford  what 
are  regarded  as  ordinary  wholesome  influ- 
ences of  home  and  family."  The  household 
god  of  the  slum  tenement  is  too  apt  to  be 


20  Oar  Sifis  in  the  Past 

the  boss  with  his  corruption  of  the  neigh- 
bor ideal  into  utter  selfishness.  On  that 
road  lies  destruction. 

In  France,  many  years  ago,  a  voice  was 
raised  in  warning  :  "  Kill  the  home  and 
you  destroy  family,  manhood,  patriotism." 
The  warning  was  vain,  and  the  home- 
loving  Germans  won  easily  over  the  people 
in  whose  language  there  is  not  even  a  word 
to  describe  what  we  express  in  the  word 
"  home." 

How  much  of  the  strength  of  the  old 
New  England  home  went  into  the  making 
of  our  Republic  you  know  as  well  as  I.  It 
is  that  thought  which  makes  me  pause 
when  I  remember  that  in  their  day  one  in 
twenty-five  of  the  people  lived  in  cities, 
whereas  now  the  showing  is  one  in  three, 
with  all  of  the  influences  of  the  city  seem- 
ing to  push  against  the  chief  prop  of  the 
State,  the  home.  Is  it  not  the  chief  prop  ? 
Imagine  a  nation  of  homeless  men,  a  nation 
deserving  the  epithet,  "  the  homeless  peo- 
ple " ;    what   would    it   have   to   preserve. 


Oar  Sins  in  the  Past  21 

what  to  fight  for?  And  however  given  to 
peace  we  all  may  be,  in  the  last  analysis  the 
test  of  a  nation's  fitness  to  live  is  that  it  will 
fight  for  its  life.  No !  wipe  out  the  home 
and  the  whole  structure  totters  and  falls. 
Even  if  it  hang  together  yet  a  while,  it  is 
not  worth  preserving,  not  worth  fighting 
for. 

If  we  had  any  doubt  about  it,  we 
have  had  some  information  upon  the  sub- 
ject given  us  in  recent  years,  in  my  state 
and  in  yours.  It  was  here  in  your  city 
that  the  Children's  Aid  Society  demon- 
strated, in  a  way  that  did  us  all  good 
through  and  through,  that  the  old  plan  of 
bringing  up  children  in  squads,  which  had 
been  tried  until  it  sickened  them  and  us, 
was  bad,  and  that  placing  them  out  in 
families  made  all  the  difference  in  the 
world.  We  knew  it  before,  but  we  needed 
to  be  told  it  in  just  that  way.  We  had  the 
experience  over  again  in  New  York  ;  they 
had  it  in  Boston  ;  they  have  had  it  ever}^- 
where.     But   very  lately   we   have   had   a 


22  Oar  Sins  in  the  Past 

piece  of  testimony  to  that  effect  that  ought 
to  settle  the  matter.  It  was  an  old  scandal 
in  our  city  that  practically  all  the  babies  in 
the  Foundling  Hospital  died  there  ;  none 
lived  to  grow  up.  I  say  scandal,  not  in  the 
sense  that  any  one  was  to  blame.  They 
tried  hard  enough.  Men  are  not  monsters 
to  see  a  defenseless  baby  die  without  trying 
to  help  it.  In  the  worst  Tammany  daj^s,  we 
had  herds  of  Jersey  cows  on  Randall's 
Island,  kept  expressly  for  those  waifs. 
Everything  was  done  that  pity  and  experi- 
ence could  suggest,  but  nothing  availed. 
The  babies  died,  and  there  was  no  help  for 
it.  Until  four  years  ago,  when  a  joint  com- 
mittee of  the  State  Charities'  Aid  Asso- 
ciation and  the  New  York  Association  for 
Improving  the  Condition  of  the  Poor,  took 
them  off  the  hands  of  the  city  authorities 
and  put  them  in  homes.  The  first  year 
after  that  the  mortality  among  them  fell  to 
a  little  over  fifty  per  cent.,  the  second  year 
it  was  just  beyond  thirty  per  cent,  and  the 
fourth,  which  was  last  year,  it  had  fallen  to 


Oar  Sins  in  the  Past  23 

ten  and  seven-tenths  per  cent.,  a  figure  quite 
below  the  mortality  among  all  the  children 
under  two  years  of  age  in  the  whole  city. 
And  the  experience  in  Brooklyn  was  just 
the  same. 

What  did  it  mean  ?  It  meant  this,  and 
nothing  less,  that  these  children  had  come 
at  last  to  their  rights ;  that  every  baby  is 
entitled  to  one  pair  of  mother's  arms 
around  its  neck  ;  that  its  God-given  right 
is  a  home, — a  home ;  and  that,  when  man 
robs  it  of  that  right,  it  will  not  stay.  And 
small  blame  to  it !  It  shows  that  even 
foundling  babies  have  good  sense.  They 
stayed,  these,  in  such  numbers — their  death 
rate  fell  below  the  ordinary  death  rate  of  all 
the  children  of  their  age — because  they  were 
picked  homes  they  were  put  into.  It  meant, 
friends,  that  God  puts  a  little  child  in  a 
home  because  He  wants  it  to  grow  up  with 
that  as  its  most  precious  heritage,  its  spark 
of  heaven  that  ever  beckons  it  to  its  true 
home  beyond.  It  means  that  you  cannot 
herd  human  beings  in  battalions  and  expect 


24  Our  Sins  in  the  Past 

them  to  develop  the  qualities  of  individu- 
ality, of  character,  that  make  citizenship 
upon  which  to  build  the  Republic  that  shall 
be  the  hope  of  to-morrow  as  well  as  the 
shelter  of  to-day.  We  tried  that  with  the 
"  communities  "  that  wiped  out  the  family 
and  substituted  the  barrack  for  the  home. 
But  happily  they  wiped  out  themselves. 
No,  brethren,  upon  the  home  rests  our  moral 
character ;  our  civic  and  political  liberties 
are  grounded  there ;  virtue,  manhood,  citi- 
zenship grow  there.  We  forget  it  to  our 
peril.  For  American  citizenship  in  the 
long  run,  will  be,  must  he,  what  the  Ameri- 
can home  is. 

And  this  home,  how  does  it  look  to  me  ? 
The  ideal,  always  in  my  mind,  is  that  of  a 
man  with  his  feet  upon  the  soil  and  his 
children  growing  up  there.  So,  it  seems 
to  me,  we  should  have  responsible  citizen- 
ship by  the  surest  road.  But  that  ideal  is 
unattainable  in  our  cities.  We  must  find 
another  there.  And  I  ask,  as  the  mini- 
mum standard,  less  than  which  I  will  not 


Our  Sins  in  the  Past  25 

take,  isolation  enough  in  the  teeming  crowds 
to  secure  the  privacy  without  which  indi- 
viduality cannot  grow  and  character  is 
fearfully  handicapped.  I  ask  light  and  air, 
at  least  as  plentiful  and  as  good  as  they 
have  it  in  the  great  cattle  barns  I  have  seen 
in  my  own  old  home,  where  their  cows  are 
their  most  precious  possession,  because 
through  them  the  people  make  their  living. 
I  ask  an  environment  in  which  a  man  may 
think  himself  a  respectable  citizen,  an  en- 
vironment that  has  no  suggestion  of  the 
pigsty.  You  have  no  business  to  try  to  per- 
suade an  American  citizen  that  that  is  his 
place.  It  is  treason  against  the  republic. 
I  ask,  above  all,  the  mother  who  makes  the 
home ;  I  want  the  mother.  Without  her, 
home  is  but  an  empty  name. 

What,  then,  of  the  barrack  that  destroys 
privacy,  whose  crowds  make  life  loathsome, 
whose  restricted  and  narrow  quarters  com- 
pel the  use  of  the  family  room  only  for  eat- 
ing and  sleeping  ;  not  the  latter  even  when 
the  summer  heats  come  and  the  people,  to 


26  Oar  Sins  in  the  Past 

live,  must  sleep  on  the  roof  or  out  on  the 
fire-escape?  What  of  those  things  which 
send  the  children  to  the  street,  there  to 
grow  such  character  as  they  can ;  that 
smother  in  them  even  the  instinct  for  the 
open,  for  the  fields  and  the  woods  that  is 
like  the  last  open  window  for  the  soul ; 
rob  them  of  those  resources  of  mind  and 
heart  that  make  them  respond  quickly  to 
the  robin's  and  the  daisy's  appeal  and  make 
them  at  home  in  God's  nature ;  that  give 
them  the  gutter  for  a  playground,  and  the 
saloon,  as  they  grow,  for  their  natural 
meeting-place, — their  only  one,  indeed  ;  for 
it  is  only  just  beginning  to  dawn  upon  us 
that  in  neglecting  that  function  of  the  pub- 
lic school,  we  have  been  guilty  of  a  fearful 
and  wicked  waste. 

What  of  these  ;  and  what  of  the  need — 
the  need  of  making  the  rent — that  sends 
the  mother  to  the  factory,  leaving  perhaps 
the  little  ones  behind,  locked  in  as  the  only 
alternative  of  the  street?  Locked  in  and  left 
to  the  chance,  the  awful  chance,  of  a  fire 


Oar  Sins  in  the  Past  27 

in  that  tenement  with  the  children  help- 
less to  get  out  and  no  one  knowing  of 
their  plight.  I  say  it  with  a  shudder,  for 
I  have  had  to  record  as  a  reporter  too 
many — oh  !  God  !  too  many  by  far — of 
these  things  which  wring  the  heart  of  a 
man.  What  of  the  grinding  need  that 
sends  the  mother  to  the  shop  and  so 
knocks  the  big  and  the  strong  prop  from 
under  the  home  ? 

Or,  perhaps,  the  children  go  along.  Then 
there  is  no  home ;  for  I  do  not  call  the 
cheerless  room  to  which  they  return  for 
their  evening  meal,  tired  and  worn  and 
spiritless,  to  sleep  but  not  to  play — I  do 
not  call  that  home. 

We  know  the  curse  of  child  labor.  We 
know  it  to  our  sorrow  and  loss.  Experi- 
ence has  taught  us  that  it  is  loss,  all  loss, 
ever  tending  doAvnward ;  that,  however  we 
figure  it,  the  result  is  always  the  same : 
where  men  alone  work,  they  earn  the 
support  of  the  family ;  where  men  and 
women  work,  they  together  earn  the  sup- 


28  Oar  Stns  in  the  Past 

port,  with  nothing  to  spare  ;  and  where 
men,  women  and  children  work,  they  do 
that  and  no  more  ;  so  that  nothing  is  gained 
and  everything  is  lost.  Child-life  and 
citizenship  are  lost ;  for  the  children  of  to- 
day are  the  men  of  to-morrow.  We  know 
it  to  our  cost,  and  you  have  the  lesson  be- 
fore you,  though  you  do  not  seem  to  have 
learned  it.  When  you  do,  you  will  find  the 
cost  appalling. 

What  else  was  the  meaning  of  the  testi- 
mony given  before  the  Coal  Strike  Commis- 
sion, that  moved  its  members  to  tears  and 
anger  by  turns  ?  And  why  in  the  twelfth 
census  has  Pennsylvania  fallen  from  the  six- 
teenth to  the  twentieth  place  on  the  list  of 
states  that  send  their  children  to  school  ? 
It  is  true  that  there  has  been  no  absolute 
retrogression,  for  while  in  1890  there  were 
over  two  per  cent,  of  your  children  between 
the  ages  of  ten  and  fourteen  years  who  could 
neither  read  nor  write,  in  1900  the  illiter- 
ates numbered  barely  over  one  in  a  hun- 
dred.    But  that  one  is  one  too  many,  and 


Ottr  Sins  in  the  Past  29 

why  is  he  there  ?  Because,  according  to 
the  showing  of  the  factory  inspectors — and 
the  factory  inspectors  are  always  optimists 
— there  were  thirty-five  thousand  of  your 
children  at  work,  who  should  have  been  in 
school,  not  counting  the  breaker-boys  in 
your  mines.  As  to  them,  the  coal  operators 
owned  up  to  thirty  thousand  being  in  the 
mines  who  never  should  have  been  there. 

So  we  are  not  alone  in  our  sins  against 
childhood.  New  York  is  first  among  the 
great  industrial  states,  Pennsylvania  is  sec- 
ond, and  this  is  the  showing  we  make  as 
toward  the  citizenship  of  to-morrow  :  New 
York  fourteenth,  Pennsylvania  twentieth. 
Even  South  Dakota  and  Wyoming  are 
ahead  of  Pennsylvania,  and  Utah  a  long 
way  ahead  of  New  York.  Industrial 
States  !  The  industrial  supremacy  that  is 
bought  at  the  expense  of  childhood's  rights 
tends  directly  to  man's  enslavement.  It  is 
too  dearly  bought.  Sins  against  childhood 
are  sins  against  the  home,  are  cheating  the 
world  of  its  to-morrow.    And  you  salve  your 


30  Our  Sins  in  the  Past 

consciences  in  vain  with  the  thought  that 
those  illiterate  ones  are  the  children  of  for- 
eigners. Yoii  let  them  in,  to  be  your 
Americans  of  the  day  that  is  coming  ; — you 
sent  for  them,  your  critics  say,  to  underbid 
the  labor  that  sought  a  higher  wage  be- 
cause they  wanted  American  homes, — and 
it  is  your  business  to  see  to  it  that  they,  or 
their  children,  at  all  events,  fit  into  the 
state  of  which  you  have  made  them  part. 
Or  woe  to  that  state  ! 

You  need  not  marvel  that  in  the  com- 
monwealth that  forgets  its  duty  to  the 
home  even  to  that  extent,  you  have  a 
heavy  contract  on  your  hands  to  redeem  its 
greatest  city.  It  is  the  same  conscience 
that  is  asleep  there.  It  is  all  of  a  piece. 
Every  once  in  awhile  I  hear  some  one 
growl  against  foreign  missions  because  the 
money  and  the  strength  put  into  them  are 
needed  at  home.  I  did  it  myself  when  I 
did  not  know  better,  God  forgive  me.  I 
know  better  now  ;  and  I  will  tell  you  how 
I    found    out.     I    became   interested   in   a 


Our  Sins  in  the  Past  31 

strong  religious  awakening  in  my  own 
old  city  of  Copenhagen,  and  I  set  about  in- 
vestigating it.  It  was  then  that  I  learned 
what  others  have  learned  before  me,  and 
what  was  the  fact  there,  that  for  every  dol- 
lar you  give  away  to  convert  the  heathen 
abroad,  God  gives  you  ten  dollars'  worth  of 
purpose  to  deal  with  your  heathen  at  home. 
So,  as  you  set  about  crushing  out  selfish- 
ness, greed  and  evil  in  the  state,  you  step  on 
the  snake's  head  at  home, — in  3^our  own  city. 

You  do  not  need  the  city  tenement  as  a 
monument  of  civic  folly  in  wrecking  the 
home.  There  are  other  ways  of  doing  it, 
and  none  surer  or  quicker  than  by  forcing 
the  children  to  labor  when  they  should  be  at 
play.  The  city  crowds  have  no  monopoly 
of  the  slum,  though  they  have  the  lion's 
share  of  it.  It  thrives  wherever  ignorance 
and  helpless  poverty  are,  and  child  labor  is 
the  shortest  road  to  both. 

The  city  tenements  are  the  crowded  high- 
way. Listen  to  this  description  of  them 
in  my  own  city  : 


32  Our  Sins  in  the  Past 

"  The  tenement  districts  of  New  York  are 
places  in  which  thousands  of  people  are  liv- 
ing in  the  smallest  space  in  which  it  is  pos- 
sible for  human  beings  to  exist — crowded 
together  in  dark,  ill-ventilated  rooms,  in 
many  of  which  the  sunlight  never  enters, 
and  in  most  of  which  fresh  air  is  unknown. 
They  are  centres  of  disease,  poverty,  vice 
and  crime,  where  it  is  a  marvel — not  that 
children  grow  up  to  be  thieves,  drunkards 
and  prostitutes,  but  that  so  many  should 
ever  grow  up  to  be  decent  and  self-respect- 
ing. All  the  conditions  which  surround 
childhood,  youth  and  womanhood  in  New 
York's  crowded  tenement  quarters  make  for 
unrighteousness.  They  also  make  for  dis- 
ease. There  is  hardly  a  tenement  house  in 
which  there  has  not  been  at  least  one  case 
of  pulmonary  tuberculosis  within  the  last 
five  years,  and  in  some  houses  there  have 
been  as  great  a  number  as  twenty-two  dif- 
ferent cases  of  this  terrible  disease.  From 
the  tenements  there  comes  a  stream  of  sick, 
helpless   people   to   our   hospitals  and  dis- 


Our  Sins  in  the  Past  33 

pensaries — from  them  also  comes  a  host  of 
paupers  and  charity  seekers.  The  most 
terrible  of  all  the  features  of  tenement- 
house  life  in  New  York,  however,  is  the  in- 
discriminate herding  of  all  kinds  of  people 
in  close  contact ;  the  fact  that,  mingled 
with  the  drunken,  the  dissolute,  the  im- 
provident, the  diseased,  dwell  the  great 
mass  of  the  respectable  workingmen  of  the 
city  with  their  families." 

I  am  not  quoting  newspaper  condemna- 
tion. The  newspapers  have  not  always 
been  found  on  that  side  of  the  line.  I  am 
not  quoting  from  my  own  writings,  these 
many  years,  on  this  subject.  The  paragraph 
is  from  the  official  report  of  the  Tenement 
House  Commission  of  1900,  of  which  I  was 
not  a  member ;  nor  is  it  alone  in  its  con- 
demnation. "  They,"  said  the  Tenement 
House  Committee  of  1894,  speaking  of  the 
tenements,  "  interfere  with  the  separateness 
and  sacredness  of  the  home,  and  .  .  . 
conduce  to  the  corruption  of  the  young." 
There   you   have  it  in  a  nut-shell.     They 


34  Oar  Sins  in  the  Past 

destroy  the  home  and  corrupt  youth  !  But 
think  of  it !  "  All  the  conditions  make  for 
unrighteousness  " — in  a  city  of  soon  four 
million  souls,  half  of  whom  come  under 
that  ban !  And  all  the  cities  in  the  land 
copying  after  and  tending  the  same  way, — 
with  yours,  thank  God!  bringing  up  the 
rear.  Keep  Philadelphia  there,  brethren, 
as  you  value  your  civic  life.  With  the 
tenement  added  to  the  rest  you  will  never 
work  out  from  under  it.  Keep  it  out,  under 
whatever  name  it  comes,  whether  as  a 
French  flat,  an  apartment  house,  or  what 
not.  It  all  means  the  destruction  of  the 
home  ideal.  Flats  are  but  showy  tenements. 
There  is  not  one  of  them  with  a  chimney 
big  enough  to  let  in  Santa  Glaus,  and  you 
might  as  well  give  up  at  once  as  to  have 
him  excluded.  There  are  few  enough  of 
them  that,  were  the  watchful  eye  of  the 
sanitary  policeman  taken  off  them  for  six 
months,  would  not  turn  out  as  bad  as  the 
worst.  And  he  has  got  one  eye  on  the  dis- 
trict   leader    now.     Keep    out    the    tene- 


Oar  Sins  in  the  Past  35 

ment ;  it  is  the  enemy  of  the  common- 
wealth. And  ever  hold  in  high  honor  the 
men  who  fight  that  fight  for  you,  whether 
they  be  Jewish  rabbis,  Christian  ministers, 
or  lay  brethren  laboring  for  the  good  of 
their  kind.     They  fight  for  your  very  life. 

I  shall  have  much  to  say  about  these 
tenements  hereafter.  I  will  try  to  show  in 
pictures  that  will  help  you  to  the  under- 
standing of  it,  how  they  injure  the  social 
fabric.  Here  I  wish  to  remind  you  that 
that  injury  is  yours  as  well  as  ours.  An 
injury  to  one  is  the  concern  of  all  in  a  de- 
mocracy like  ours.  You  cannot  have  citi- 
zenship tainted  at  one  end  of  the  line  and 
expect  to  keep  it  untainted  at  the  other  end. 
It  works  mischief  both  ways.  Ignorance 
hurts  the  state  in  the  man  who  groans 
under  it,  and  in  the  man  who  enslaved  his 
mind,  who  permitted  and  was  responsible 
for  the  outrage.  It  is  of  no  use  to  shut  our 
eyes  to  it.  The  slum  is  a  cancer  that  has 
long  roots  reaching  the  avenue  as  well  as 
the     alley.     The     consciousness,     however 


36  Ottr  Sins  in  the  Past 

vague,  of  having  betrayed  his  brother, 
breeds  hardness  of  heart  in  the  betrayer,  for 
which  alms-giving  does  not  atone. 

"  Forgiveness  to  the  injured  doth  belong, 
He  never  forgives  who  did  the  wrong. ' ' 

Watch  and  you  will  find  that,  when  the 
slum  vote  is  most  in  evidence,  careless 
wealth  goes  shooting  on  election  day  and 
lets  the  Republic  go  to  the  dogs.  Well  may 
the  president  make  the  slum  an  issue  in  his 
message !  He  is  right,  for  citizenship  is 
murdered  there.  And  well  may  the  Church 
put  the  redemption  of  the  slum  increas- 
ingly into  its  preaching  and  into  its  prac- 
tice !  It  is  angling  for  living  men,  not  for 
dead  ones.  I  spoke  of  pigsties.  Tell  me, 
what  sense  is  there  in  a  man's  sitting  com- 
fortably in  his  pew  of  a  Sunday,  inviting 
his  soul  with  a  view  of  the  beautiful  man- 
sion he  has  engaged  on  high,  and  letting 
his  brother  below  wallow  in  his  slough 
the  while?  Do  you  think  that  bargain 
will  stand?  I  do  not.  I  think  he  runs 
a    very    excellent   chance,  when    his   race 


Our  Stns  in  the  Past  37 

is  over,  of  having  to  take  his  turn  in  the 
sty.  We  are  brothers  whether  we  own  it  or 
not,  and  you  and  I  together  have  to  carry 
the  load  which  is  of  our  making.  Try  you 
ever  so  hard,  you  cannot  lay  down  your 
end,  and  neither  oan  I,  mine. 

Is  it  not  the  old,  old  story  of  human 
selfishness  that  tries  ever  to  get  the  easy 
end  at  the  expense  of  the  toiling  brother? 
The  woman  who  shuts  her  eyes  to  the  fact 
that  "  women's  wages  have  no  lowest  limit, 
since  the  paths  of  shame  are  always  open 
to  them,"  ^  and  joins  in  the  rush  at  the  bar- 
gain counter,  the  pennies  she  saves  literally, 
literally  the  life-drops  of  her  sister,  body 
and  soul !  the  selfish  man  who  says : 
"  What  is  it  to  me?  "  the  labor  leader  who, 
for  personal  gain,  sacrifices  his  cause,  which 
is  the  cause  of  human  progress,  ^'  the  ef- 
fort of  men,  being  men,  to  live  like  men  " — 
these  are  they  who  are  selling  the  American 
home  in  our  cities  into  slavery.  If  anything 
could  make  me  believe  in  purgatory,  it  is 

•  Report  of  Working  Women's  Society  in  New  York  City. 


38  Our  Sins  in  the  Past 

the  existence  of  their  kind.  We  all  need 
making  over,  but  they  seem  to  need  purging 
by  fire  to  turn  the  demon  of  selfishness  out 
of  them,  that  the  spirit  of  brotherhood  may 
enter.  I  do  not  know — I  am  not  a  prophet 
— but  I  think  I  can  make  out  that  we  are 
on  the  eve  of  great  social  changes,  for 
which  our  democracy  was  meant  to  prepare 
us,  but  for  which  it  finds  us  even  now  unfit. 
And  all  because  of  that  one  thing,  the  great 
obstacle ! 

The  blindness  of  them,  not  to  see  it ! 
Whichever  way  we  turn,  where  the  selfish- 
ness crops  out  that  is  where  the  mistake 
is  made  that  forfeits  public  sympathy,  while 
it  holds  up  the  cause  of  human  progress. 
Capital  earns  its  fair  reward.  Promptly  it 
seeks  to  crush  out  its  neighbor — calls  it 
protecting  its  own  interests,  as  though  we 
were  so  many  beasts  of  prey  whose  appe- 
tites were  the  one  thing  we  had  in  com- 
mon ;  proclaims  from  the  house-tops  the 
age-old  doctrine  of  privilege — God-given 
privilege  ! — from  which  the  world  has  been 


Our  Sins  in  the  Past  39 

trying  for  centuries  to  get  away  ;  calls  the 
President  of  the  United  States,  when  he 
tries  to  make  peace,  a  tinkering  politician  ; 
and  sits  in  the  high  seat  of  the  constitution, 
as  if  it  were  made  for  the  protection  of 
property  only  and  had  nothing  whatever  to 
do  with  the  people  !  I  yield  to  no  man  in 
my  respect  for  the  constitution  of  our  land. 
It  is  so  great  and  so  real  that  I  object  to 
having  it  worked  up  into  either  a  sceptre  to 
coerce  men,  or  a  fetish  to  cajole  them,  as 
much  as  I  object  to  having  the  Bible  used 
that  way.  I  take  the  constitution  to  be  a 
human  document,  the  record  of  action 
taken  by  wise  and  patriotic  men  to  meet 
emergencies  that  arose  in  their  day. 
Unless  we  are  to  assume  that  wisdom  died 
with  them  ;  that  human  experience  w^as 
completed  and  bound  in  volumes  to  file 
away  on  dusty  shelves,  with  nothing  more 
ever  to  happen  that  requires  judgment  or 
action  ;  or  unless  we  are  to  confess  ourselves 
unable  to  take  such  action  when  the  time 
comes,  we  shall  be  wise  to  drop  the  fetish 


4©  Our  Sins  in  the  Past 

business  and  to  deal  with  the  constitution 
as  men  capable  of  defending  their  lives 
and  their  liberties,  including  the  right  to 
work,  and  the  right  not  to  be  frozen  to 
death  at  the  dictation  of  a  half  dozen  coal 
kings,  upon  any  plane  upon  which  those 
liberties  may  be  attacked.  This  intense  re- 
gard for  the  constitution,  that  is  wont  to 
develop  in  men  and  newspapers  in  exact 
ratio  as  their  love  of  the  brother  dies, 
always  suggests  to  me  the  fatal  ritualism 
that  is  akin  to  the  letter  that  killeth. 
Something  has  to  make  up  for  that  which 
has  been  lost ;  but  nothing  ever  can. 

The  wrongs  of  wealth  !  We  all  know 
them.  "  It  is  the  denial  of  them,"  said 
Theodore  Roosevelt  to  me  the  other  day, 
"  that  has  confronted  the  world  with  the 
challenge  that  '  property  is  theft.'  "  And 
he  was  right.  But  capital  has  no  monopoly 
of  wrong.  Labor  organizes  its  multitudes 
and  instantly  raises  a  club  to  keep  out  the 
man  who  does  not  think  as  the  next  man 
does,  with  violence  if  he  will  not  go  will- 


Our  Sins  in  the  Past  41 

ingly.  The  shallow  self-seeking  of  its  ad- 
vocates, the  ignorant  blundering  of  their 
followers,  is  often  enough  to  make  one  sick 
at  heart.  We  have  to  look  beyond  them 
to  the  real  claims  of  the  cause  of  labor  to 
having  served  the  world  by  making  homes 
out  of  hovels,  by  making  free  men  out  of 
slaves,  by  giving  back  to  man  his  self-re- 
spect. We  have  to  take  the  long-range 
view  to  forget  the  immediate  injury  and 
put  things  right.  Organized  labor,  with 
all  its  mistakes,  has  put  us  heavily  into  its 
debt,  for  it  is  true  that  "  only  a  self-respect- 
ing people  can  remain  a  free  people." 
Wrongs  there  are  on  both  sides.  If  capital 
sought  but  its  just  reward,  it  would  find  it 
compatible  with  giving  labor  its  fair 
share.  If  labor  thought  of  the  rights  of 
the  employer  with  its  own  ;  if  the  fight 
were  ever  for  the  good  of  the  race  as  it 
was  meant  to  be  ;  if  the  union  label  al- 
ways guaranteed  honest  work,  a  living 
wage,  no  sweatshop  or  child  labor,  a 
clean   shop   and   a  fair  observance   of  the 


42  Our  Sins  in  the  Past 

factory  laws,  its  cause  would  be  irre- 
sistible. 

That  is  it.  You  know  it  and  I  know  it. 
The  right,  when  it  appears  stripped  of  all 
self-seeking,  is  irresistible.  Hence  our  fight 
is  never  hopeless  or  vain. 

The  employer  who  says  that  he  will  not 
treat  with  his  men,  that  they  must  obey  or 
get  out,  forfeits  public  sympathy  and  loses 
his  case  in  our  day.  The  self-seeking 
union  that  betrays  its  cause  has  no  standing 
in  the  court  of  public  opinion.  It  means 
that  appeal  can  be  made  to  the  good  in 
men,  can  be  made  with  more  success  than 
ever.  I  am  warned  to  beware  of  a  false 
optimism  that  digs  pitfalls  for  our  feet  by 
making  us  think  there  is  nothing  more  to 
mend.  I  know  that  danger  ;  but  that  the 
warning  should  be  uttered  is  in  itself  the 
greatest  endorsement  of  my  faith  in  the 
better  day  that  is  dawning.  There  was 
little  enough  to  tie  that  faith  to  in  the  days 
when  I  wrote  "  How  the  Other  Half 
Lives  "  ;  but  there  is  enough  now  for  us  all 


Oar  Sins  in  the  Past  43 

to  see,  and  I,  in  turn,  warn  him  who  will 
not  see  it,  against  the  pessimism  that  is 
both  false  and  disabling.  No,  thank  God, 
you  can  at  last  make  your  appeal  to  the 
consciences  of  men,  and  that  is  why  I  make 
it  here.  I  want  the  church  to  back  it.  It 
is  from  that  quarter  that  I  expect  the  strong 
blows  to  be  struck  for  the  home,  the  blows 
that  will  tell.  ''  All  the  conditions  which 
surround  childhood,  youth  and  woman- 
hood "  in  the  crowded  tenements  of  New 
York  City,  of  the  metropolis,  "  make  for 
unrighteousness."  Is  not  the  call  to  the 
Church  of  God  ? 

Yes !  and  it  has  heard  the  call  and  is 
heeding  it.  I  have  before  me  the  record  of 
the  social  activities  of  one  church,  St. 
George's,  of  which  my  friend.  Dr.  Rains- 
ford,  whom  you  know,  is  the  rector.  The 
year  books  of  Grace  Church,  of  St.  Barthol- 
omew's, of  Calvary,  of  scores  of  churches 
in  New  York,  would  have  like  stories  to 
tell.  This  grocery  department,  this  sewing 
school,  this  employment  society,  these  help- 


44  Oar  Sins  in  the  Past 

ing  hands,  kindergartens,  cooking  schools 
and  mothers'  clubs — they  all  mean  one 
thing,  the  determination  to  reclaim  the 
home  that  is  in  peril ;  they  mean  that  the 
men  and  women  struggling  there  shall  have 
backing ;  that  they  shall  not  be  permitted 
"to  be  content "  as  they  are,  for  when  a 
man  lies  down  under  the  slum  he  is  lost. 
It  means  that  war  is  declared  against  the 
slum,  and  is  to  be  fought  to  the  bitter  end. 
The  Church  is  coming  to  the  rescue,  and  I 
am  glad  to  bear  witness  that  mine  is  in  the 
van  in  generous  rivalry  with  its  neighbors. 
Shall  I  tell  you  how  I  came  to  be  an 
Episcopalian  ?  I  had  long  been  tempted 
by  my  friendship  for  the  rector  whose 
church  I  attended  in  my  own  town,  though 
I  was  not  a  member  of  his  flock.  I  had 
been  a  Lutheran,  a  Methodist,  a  Congrega- 
tionalist  in  my  day  ;  I  would  be  a  Roman 
Catholic  rather  than  be  nothing  at  all, 
though  that  would  go  hard  with  me. 
Denominational  fetters  ever  sat  lightly 
upon   me,  perhaps  too  lightly.     So  that  I 


Our  Sins  in  the  Past  45 

marched  under  the  flag,  I  cared  less  what 
regimental  badge  I  wore.  But  one  day,  I 
read  in  my  newspaper  a  growl  from  the 
East-side  about  Bishop  Potter's  Mission,  the 
Pro-cathedral  in  Stanton  Street.  "  Their 
services,"  wrote  the  man  who  did  me  this 
favor,  "  are  of  the  kindergarten  class  :  clubs, 
gymnastics,  mothers'  meetings,  girls'  dress- 
making classes — and  they  call  that  relig- 
ion ! "  Ah  !  I  thought,  is  that  what  they 
are  doing  over  there  ?  and  I  waited  for  the 
answer  that  was  not  long  in  coming. 

"  Yes,"  wrote  the  priest  in  charge,  "  we 
call  it  that ;  and,  furthermore,  it  is  our  be- 
lief that  a  love  of  God  that  does  not  forth- 
with seek  to  run  itself  into  some  kindly 
deed  to  man  is  not  worth  having."  That 
was  their  creed — I  called  it  ever  after  "  the 
Bishop's  creed," — and  I  told  Bishop  Potter 
then  and  there  that  if  that  was  the  creed 
of  his  church  I  would  join,  and  I  did. 

I  shall  have  occasion  to  show  you  how 
the  church  missed  its  great  opportunity 
once ;  how  it  slept  through  its  chance  in 


46  Oar  Sins  in  the  Past 

the  days  that  are  gone,  and  in  its  sleep  did 
grievous  wrong  to  the  people's  homes,  which 
it  ought  to  have  defended.  Those  are  of  the 
sins  of  the  past,  and  they  have  to  be  atoned 
for ;  but,  please  God,  we  shall  not  sin  thus 
again.  The  home  that  is  in  peril  shall 
appeal,  does  appeal  to-day  to  the  Christian 
conscience — appeals  from  the  rule  of  gold 
to  the  golden  rule,  from  the  rule  of  might 
to  that  of  right ;  and  no  longer  does  it 
appeal  in  vain.  There  was  a  time,  even  in 
my  memory,  when  it  was  said  with  more 
show  of  reason  than  I  care  to  think  of,  that 
the  greatest  church  corporation  in  the  land 
was  the  worst  tenement  house  landlord  in 
New  York  City.  But  to-day  our  appeal  is 
to  the  churches.  They  aroused  our  con- 
sciences to  action  twenty  years  ago ;  they 
and  the  Christian  men  and  women  who  sit 
in  them  head  every  movement  in  our  great 
city  towards  the  redemption  of  the  home  ; 
they  led  in  the  fights  for  reform,  for  decent 
living  conditions  for  the  people,  that 
wrested  victory  from  the  slum  twice  in  the 


Oar  Sins  in  the  Past  47 

last  half  dozen  years.  You  all  remember 
those  fights  and  the  share  that  this  same 
Pro-cathedral  with  the  Bishop's  creed  bore 
in  the  last  one. 

There  was  never  such  an  arraignment  of 
a  city  government  as  that  made  by  the 
Bishop  of  New  York  in  his  letter  to  the 
mayor,  calling  upon  him,  "  in  the  name  of 
these  little  ones,  these  weak  and  defense- 
less ones,  Christian  and  Hebrew  alike,  of 
many  races  and  tongues,  but  from  homes  in 
which  God  is  feared  and  His  law  revered," 
to  save  the  people  from  a  "  living  hell  "  of 
vice  and  corruption  ;  and  never  was  there 
such  a  response  of  an  aroused  city  as  to  that 
summons.  The  heart  of  the  people  is  all 
right ;  it  is  on  the  side  of  the  Lord  and  His 
hosts,  all  doubting  Thomases  to  the  con- 
trary  notwithstanding.     Let   us   be   glad  ! 

I  remember  a  cry  for  help  that  came 
from  over  on  that  East-side,  of  which  we 
hear  so  much.  It  was  a  good  many  years 
ago  when  I  was  a  reporter  in  Mulberry 
Street,  and   it   came   from   a   church  in  a 


48  Oar  Sins  in  the  Past 

letter  to  the  Police  Board  asking  for  pro- 
tection against  the  boj^s  who  played  in  the 
street  in  front  of  it  and  disturbed  the  Sun- 
day worship.  The  captain  of  the  precinct 
retorted  that  they  had  no  other  place  in 
which  to  play  and  no  other  time  for  it,  and 
that  the  minister  of  that  church  had  better 
be  about  getting  them  a  playground.  That 
Avas  in  the  days  of  little  sense,  and  the  re- 
sult was  that  other  cry  that  went  up  and 
made  itself  heard  at  a  great  meeting  of 
all  the  churches  :  "  How  shall  we  lay  hold 
of  this  great  multitude  that  has  forsaken 
our  altars  ?  "  They  have  learned  since  to 
lay  hold  of  it  with  gymnastics,  kinder- 
gartens and  boys'  clubs,  and  the  little  hand- 
ful of  discouraged  communicants  has  grown 
into  hundreds  that  throng  about  the  altar 
rail  of  St.  George's  and  the  other  churches 
every  Sunday.  We  have  come  into  the 
days  of  good  sense.  I  shall  not  be  charged 
with  false  optimism  in  this ;  for  I  remem- 
ber the  day  when  the  families  on  the  reg- 
ister of  St.   George's  could  be  counted  in 


Our  Sins  in  the  Past  49 

one  short  breath,  whereas  now  the  com- 
municants number  more  than  eight  thou- 
sand, the  vast  majority  of  them  from  the 
East-side  tenements — with  the  mayor  of 
the  city  teaching  the  Bible  class  in  the 
Sunday-school  and  the  president  of  the 
Citizens'  Union  and  the  greatest  financier 
of  any  day  among  the  strong  backers  of  the 
rector  and  his  work.  I  am  but  stating  the 
facts  in  which  I  rejoice.  My  eyes  are  not 
shut  to  the  troubles  that  are  ahead  in  the 
changing  populations  over  there  ;  but  I  am 
not  afraid  of  losing  the  Lord's  fight,  and 
neither  are  those  in  charge  of  St.  George's. 
I  speak  of  it  as  typical  of  all  the  rest  of  the 
parishes  in  New  York  who  are  enlisted  in 
that  war.  It  is  the  men  who  are  not 
afraid  who  win  battles.  But  first  you  must 
plan  them. 

Right  here,  I  want  to  point  out  to  you 
young  men,  who  are  going  to  take  a  hand 
in  it,  one  of  the  weak  spots,  if  not  the  weak 
spot,  in  your  campaign  for  the  home — that 
home  which  all  the  influences  of  the  mod- 


50  Oar  Sins  in  the  Past 

ern  day  combine  to  put  in  peril.  I  mean 
the  disappearance  of  the  family  altar. 
Hand  to  hand  with  the  crowding  of  the 
home  to  the  wall,  has  gone  the  crowding 
out  of  the  things  that  make  it  the  repre- 
sentative of  heaven  on  earth ;  until  now 
one  seldom  hears  of  the  old  family  worship, 
so  seldom  that  it  almost  gives  one  a  start  to 
be  asked  to  join  in  family  prayer.  And  I 
am  not  referring  to  the  homes  of  working 
men  especially,  but  to  those  of  the  rich  and 
prosperous  as  well.  The  causes  of  it? 
They  are  many  and  complex  in  the  setting 
forth  of  them,  I  suspect :  the  hurry  of  our 
modern  life,  the  new  freedom  that  makes 
little  minds  think  themselves  bigger  than 
their  maker,  the  d!e-moralization  of  the  pub- 
lic school,  the  pressure  of  business, — it  is 
hard  to  get  the  family  together — which  is 
merely  setting  up  the  fact  of  the  scattering 
of  the  home  in  the  defense  of  it.  The 
causes  are  many,  but  the  result  is  one :  the 
wreck  of  the  home.  I  said  it  before,  of  child 
labor,  that  it  was  dearl}^  paid  for.     So  also 


Oar  Sins  in  the  Past  51 

the  business  prosperity  which  makes  us  for- 
get God  is  bought  at  a  price  no  man  can 
afford  to  pay.  It  is  my  cherished  privilege 
sometimes  to  break  bread  with  a  pious  Jew- 
ish friend,  and  when  I  see  the  family 
gathered  about  his  board  giving  thanks,  a 
blush  comes  to  my  cheek,  a  blush  for  my 
own  people.  Whence  the  abiding  strength 
of  that  marvelous  people  through  all  the 
centuries  of  persecution  in  the  name  of  the 
Prince  of  Peace,  but  from  the  fact  that  they 
still  hold  to  the  God  of  their  fathers  in  their 
homes?  I  have  been  told  of  the  experi- 
ence of  a  friend  in  a  town  not  far  from 
mine,  who  asked  his  pastor  on  the  occasion 
of  a  friendly  evening  visit  to  his  house, 
to  remain  and  pray  with  the  family.  The 
good  man's  face  lighted  up  with  pleased 
surprise,  as  he  said  :  "  I  have  been  in  this 
parish  more  than  a  year  and  this  is  the  first 
time  I  have  been  asked  to  pray  with  any  of 
my  people  in  their  homes."  Is  it  any  oc- 
casion for  wonder  that  they  have  been 
vainly  trying  for  more  than  a  dozen  years 


52  Ottr  Stns  in  the  Past 

in  that  place  to  build  a  new  and  very  much 
needed  church  ?  They  have  never  been 
able  to  raise  the  money,  though  their  own 
houses  are  particularly  nice ;  there  is  not  a 
poor  man  in  the  parish  in  the  sense  of  his 
wanting  any  of  the  necessities  of  life.  But 
why  should  they  build  a  house  for  the  Lord 
when  they  have  put  Him  out  of  their  own 
homes?  What  sense  would  there  be  in 
that? 

I  say  to  you  young  men  preparing  for  the 
priesthood,  if  you  want  strong  churches  and 
strong  men  and  women  in  them,  go  worship 
with  your  parishioners  in  their  homes.  Take 
my  word  for  it  that  you  will  be  surprised 
at  the  result.  We  have  filled  the  hungry 
mouths  in  our  land  of  plenty,  but  there  are 
more  starving  hearts  than  you  know  of  all 
about  you.  Build  up  the  family  altar,  and 
the  home  will  come  back  of  itself.  Do  not 
bother  yourselves  about  "  God  in  the  Con- 
stitution," if  you  have  Him  installed  in 
the  people's  homes.  If  God  is  feared  in 
the  home,  there  is  written  the  Constitution 


Oar  Sins  in  the  Past  53 

which  will  never  need  amendment.  The 
greatest  peril  that  besets  the  American 
home  to-day  is  its  godlessness.  Put  back  the 
family  altar  and  let  there  be  written  over  it 
the  old  stout  challenge  to  the  devil  and  his 
hordes  :  ''  As  for  me  and  my  house,  Ave  will 
serve  the  Lord  ; "  and  even  the  slum  tene- 
ment shall  seek  to  attack  it  in  vain. 

In  the  town  of  which  I  spoke,  there  have 
in  the  last  half  dozen  years  grown  up  two 
clubs,  one  for  the  men,  the  other  for  the 
women,  and  I  am  told  that  practically  they 
all  belong.  The  result  has  been  the  disap- 
pearance of  pretty  nearly  all  of  the  pleasant 
neighborhood  life  of  that  day  when  a  man 
gave  his  arm  to  his  wife  after  supper  and 
they  went  together  for  a  social  call  upon 
some  neighbor,  for  a  chat,  a  little  music> 
going  home  in  good  season  for  bed,  telling 
one  another  that  they  had  had  a  good 
time.  There  are  no  good  times  in  that 
town  any  more — not  of  that  kind  at  all 
events.  The  men  spend  the  evenings  bowl- 
ing at  the  club  ;  the  women  meet  in  com- 


54  Oar  Stns  in  the  Past 

mittees  to  plan  public  improvements.  The 
old  time  supper  has  become  a  later  dinner 
and  it  is  the  rarest  of  all  things  to  find  a 
neighbor  "  dropping  in  "  unannounced — so 
rare  that  one  feels  that  it  somehow  is  not 
good  form  any  longer.  The  family  firesides 
are  cold.  And  the  young — I  am  told  that 
there  is  a  disproportionate  number  of  them 
growing  up  idle  and  useless,  if  not  worse. 
They  have  lost  their  hold,  though  they  do 
not  know  it.  I  am  no  enemy  of  clubs, 
although  I  know  little  of  them  ;  but, 
as  a  substitute  for  the  altar,  I  will  fight  them 
until  I  die.  And  I  am  a  great  backer 
of  woman's  influence  in  public  affairs — it 
has  been  good  always  and  everywhere  in 
my  sight ;  but  I  say  to  you  now  that  I 
would  rather  see,  we  could  better  afford, 
that  every  club  and  organization  in  the 
land  should  cease  to  exist,  and  every  ten- 
pin  alley  stand  silent  and  deserted,  than  that 
the  old  home  life  which  centred  about  the 
family  hearth  should  go  from  among  us. 
With  it  goes  that  which  nothing,  no  com- 


Oar  Sins  in  the  Past  55 

mercial  gain,  no  advance  in  science,  or  gov- 
ernment or  human  knowledge,  can  replace. 

"  But  they  are  gone,"  I  hear  some  one 
say,  "  the  old  patriarchal  days,  and  you 
can't  call  them  back."  I  wish  there  was  no 
such  word  in  the  language  as  "  can't."  It 
has  made  more  mischief  than  all  the  rest  of 
them  together.  But  in  the  last  sifting  the 
world  is  run  by  the  men  who  can,  while 
those  who  can't  stand  and  look  on.  Who 
says  you  cannot  do  the  thing  that  is  right  ? 
That  is  what  we  are  here  for.  Our  business 
is  to  make  out  the  right  and  then  go  ahead 
and  do  it.  The  Lord  has  all  the  time  and 
all  the  resources  that  there  are,  and,  if  we 
do  our  best,  we  can  leave  Him  to  attend  to 
the  rest.  Can't !  If  the  Church  says  to- 
day that  it  cannot  restore  the  old  faith, 
that  it  cannot  rekindle  the  altar  fires  that 
have  grown  cold,  it  had  better  go  out  of  the 
business ;  it  has  become  an  unfaithful 
steward. 

But  as  a  matter  of  fact,  it  not  only 
can,  but  nothing  is  easier.     We  are  fighting 


$6  Our  Sins  in  the  Past 

wind-mills  of  the  devil's  making.  He  put 
them  there  to  frighten  us  off.  In  so  far  as 
we  have  lost  our  grip,  it  is  because  we 
Christians  have  been  untrue  to  our  mission, 
have  failed  to  discern  it.  I  see  in  all  the 
social  unrest  and  longings  of  the  day  the 
yearning  heart  of  the  world,  which  doctrine 
and  ceremony  and  printed  prayers  have  left 
and  ever  will  leave  cold.  It  is  the  praying 
life  it  cries  out  for.  The  very  infidel  owns 
the  perfect  man  in  our  Christ;  and  he 
turns  upon  our  faith  in  anger  because  he 
feels  that  he  has  been  cheated  of  the  love 
that  must  be  lived  by  His  followers  to  be 
felt.  Only  so  can  the  world  be  made  to  see 
God  in  man.  It  was  never  more  impatient 
for  the  sight  than  it  is  to-day. 

When  the  century  drew  to  a  close,  in 
common  with  many  others,  I  looked  for  a 
great  revival  that  should  sweep  over  men 
and  set  their  minds  toward  the  things  on 
high  ;  and,  when  it  did  not  come,  when  the 
new  century  came  in  without  it,  I  was  dis- 
appointed.    Until   one   day   there   came  a 


Oar  Sins  in  the  Past  57 

letter  to  me  from  a  friend  whom  I  had 
known  in  all  the  years  to  be  ever  busy 
among  His  poor,  toiling  early  and  late  in 
the  Master's  steps;  a  letter  that  expressed 
the  same  thought,  the  same  disappoint- 
ment. "  When  wall  it  ever  come,"  she 
wrote.  And  all  at  once  it  flashed  through 
my  mind  that  it  had  come,  so  silently,  so 
gently, — even  as  He  Himself  came  into  the 
world,  unheralded  except  by  the  angels' 
song  to  the  shepherds  in  the  field, — that  we 
knew  it  not  until  it  had  passed  and  become 
history.  What  else  is  the  mighty  philan- 
thropic movement  of  the  last  twenty  years 
that  has  swayed  the  minds  and  hearts  of 
men  ;  that  has  given  us  the  social  settle- 
ment ;  that  goes  into  the  byways  and  the 
hedges  searching  for  the  lost  neighbor  and 
compels  him  to  come  in?  What  else  is 
that  but  a  revival  of  our  faith  on  the  lines 
Christ  Himself  laid  down  :  binding  up  the 
wounds,  caring  for  the  sick  and  the  stricken, 
helping  him  over  the  hard  places,  even 
paying  his  rent  if  he  is  helpless  and  poor  ? 


58  Oar  Sins  in  the  Past 

"  And  on  the  morrow  when  he  departed 
he  took  out  twopence  and  gave  them  to 
the  host  and  said  unto  him  '  take  care  of 
him  and  whatsoever  thou  spendest  more, 
when  I  come  again  I  will  repay  thee.'  " 

Showing  mercy  !  That  is  the  badge  of 
the  neighborly  spirit.  '*  Go  thou  and  do 
likewise."  That  the  world  is  coming  back 
to  Him  by  the  door  which  the  Saviour 
Himself  pointed  out,  and  which  we  shut, 
perhaps  that  is  a  rebuke  to  us  for  our  luke- 
warmness,  for  our  little  faith  and  under- 
standing. Let  us  learn  the  lesson,  then,  in 
humility  and  repentance,  but  let  us  never 
again  be  found  saying  **  can't  "  in  His  fight. 

I  spoke  of  the  de-moralization  of  the 
public  school.  Observe  that  I  did  not  say 
demoralization  ;  I  think  we  are  working  out 
of  that.  What  I  was  thinking  of  was  that,  in 
our  sectarian  zeal  to  see  that  no  heresy  got 
in,  we  have,  perhaps,  come  perilously  near 
shutting  the  door  against  both  reverence 
and  truth,  and  so  helped  on  worse  mischief. 
It  is  a  matter  that  has  caused  me  a  good 


Our  Sins  in  the  Past  59 

deal  of  uneasiness.  I  am  troubled  about  it, 
and  yet  I  do  not  know  how  to  help  it.  Is 
it  a  sign  that  the  school,  too,  is  coming 
around  to  the  neighborhood  goal?  that  we 
have  all,  unknowingly,  been  helping  to 
haul  it  around  that  way — this,  I  mean, 
that  the  ideal  is  growing  which  would  have 
the  school  be  the  neighborhood  soul,  no 
longer  the  barren  mind,  merely  ?  I  like  to 
think  that  it  is,  and  that  this  was  the 
thought  which  moved  the  Methodist  min- 
isters to  promise  me  last  summer  to  join 
heartily  in  the  effort  to  get  the  public 
schools  in  my  city  opened  for  Sunday  con- 
certs. The  "  Lord's  Day  "  stood  in  the  way 
no  longer — rather,  it  was  what  decided 
them.  It  had  too  long  been  the  devil's  day 
among  those  East-side  multitudes. 

I  marked  out  for  myself  a  straight  talk, 
when  you  asked  me  to  come  to  you, — and 
no  preaching.  The  Lord  knew  what  He 
was  about  when  He  made  me  a  reporter,  a 
gatherer  of  facts,  and  not  a  preacher  :  He 
makes    no    mistakes.     But    brethren !      If 


6o  Our  Sins  in  the  Past 

it     had     been    different — if    I    had    been 

worthy Oh  !  when  I  look  upon  you 

young  men  preparing  to  take  up  His  work 
in  the  world — what  can  you  not  do  if  you 
but  believe  that  your  cause  is  His  !  What 
is  there  you  cannot  do?  In  my  day,  I 
have  seen  the  merest  handful  of  men  and 
women,  fewer  in  number  than  you  can 
count  upon  the  fingers  of  your  two  hands, 
but  standing  firmly  for  the  right,  pull  my 
city  upward,  upward  towards  the  light, — 
even  in  the  worst  of  its  bad  days,  and  in 
spite  of  them.  I  tell  you  now  that  if  all 
of  you  here,  going  out  to  your  work  as  you 
believe  with  the  apostolic  charge  upon  you, 
were  to  go  determined  to  follow  in  the 
apostles'  steps,  looking  neither  to  the  right 
nor  to  the  left — to  the  living  that  is  to 
keep  you,  nor  to  what  expediency  whispers 
— never  losing  hope,  never  hanging  your 
heads,  not  being  afraid  of  being  called 
optimists — Christ  was  the  great  optimist 
of  all  ages ;  He  never  lost  hope  even  of 
us — what   could   you   not   do?     I   learned 


Oar  Sins  in  the  Past  61 

something  when  I  was  last  in  Denmark, 
where  they  make  butter  for  a  living  and 
where  they  have  two  kinds  of  Christians, 
the  happy  Christians,  as  they  are  called, 
and  the  *'  hell  preachers  "  ;  I  learned  there 
that,  if  you  want  good  butter,  you  must  buy 
it  of  the  happy  Christians ;  they  make  the 
best.  So  it  is  in  all  things  in  the  world ; 
the  happy  Christians  made  it  go  round. 
I  tell  you,  brethren,  that  if  all  of  you  here 
now,  or  the  half  of  you,  or  the  fourth  of 
you,  were  to  go  out  to  your  work  in  that 
spirit,  in  the  spirit  of  a  dear  old  Lutheran 
woman  I  once  knew  who  said  on  her  death- 
bed, "  I  know  but  Him  and  Him  crucified  ; 
if  there  is  anything  else  I  should  know  I 
am  afraid  I  don't," — if  you  were  to  go  forth 
to  your  work  in  that  spirit,  letting  all  else 
go.  Christian  unity  would  come  on  the  wave 
of  an  irresistible  flood ;  so  does  the  world 
hunger  for  the  message  you  carry. 

Suppose  you  do  not  live  to  see  it  come  ? 
We  have  so  little  time  that  we  are  always 
in  a  hurry,  but  He  has  all  the  time  there  is. 


62  Our  Sins  in  the  Past 

Why  should  I  let  the  fact  discourage  me 
that  wrongs  are  not  all  righted  at  once?  It 
is  nineteen  hundred  years  since  Christ  came 
to  a  sin-ridden  world  to  free  it  from  bond- 
age, and  it  is  sin-ridden  yet.  Why  should 
I  think  that  I  should  be  able  to  do  better 
in  my  little  time?  I  have  a  friend  who, 
for  many  years,  was  connected  with  the 
naval  observatory  in  Washington.  A 
couple  of  years  ago,  when  he  was  retired,  I 
said  to  him  that  I  always  looked  upon  an 
astronomer  with  a  kind  of  awe, — he  seemed 
to  me  to  be  so  near  to  the  Almighty,  at  his 
elbow  seeing  Him  work,  as  it  were ;  and 
my  friend  smiled. 

"  I  have  not  looked  through  a  telescope 
at  a  star  in  a  dozen  years,"  he  said.  **  All 
the  years  I  have  been  in  the  service  I  have 
been  carrying  on  certain  calculations  that 
were  begun  before  I  was  a  man  and  that 
will  go  on  years  after  I  am  dead.  When 
they  are  finished  at  last,  we  shall  know 
something  worth  knowing.  Meanwhile,  I 
and  the  rest  of  us  have  been  but  links  in 


Oar  Sins  in  the  Past  63 

the  long  chain  upon  whose  trusty  work  de- 
pends the  final  value  of  it  all.  That  I  have 
tried  to  do  my  part  faithfully  must  be  my 
reward." 

What  greater  reward  could  any  man  ask 
than  this — to  be  a  link,  however  humble, 
in  the  chain  which  links  our  world  of  men 
with  God's  kingdom  on  high  and  helps  pre- 
pare this  earth  for  His  coming  in  His  own 
good  time? 


II 

OUR  FIGHT  FOR  THE  HOME 


II 

OUR   FIGHT   FOR  THE   HOME 

When  I  was  preparing  these  lectures,  it 
happened  that  I  went  out  of  town  and,  re- 
turning, crossed  the  river  to  New  York  in 
the  morning  before  sunrise.  I  stood  at  the 
bow  of  the  ferry-boat  and  looked  at  the 
city,  lying  wrapped  in  gloom,  indistinguish- 
able except  for  a  light  in  some  big  building, 
itself  unseen,  piercing  it  here  and  there. 
But,  over  and  beyond  the  gloom,  the  ruddy 
glow  of  the  morning  that  was  breaking 
grew  steadily  as  I  looked.  I  knew  that 
soon  it  would  be  bright  daylight.  As  I 
stood  and  watched  it  and  as  one  after  an- 
other the  outlines  of  the  old  landmarks 
came  out  and  took  shape,  I  thought  that 
so,  at  last,  the  dawn  is  breaking  upon  us  in 
this  fight  for  the  home  upon  which  all 
hinges.     It  is  no  longer  an  uphill  fight  all 

the  time. 

67 


68  Our  Fight  for  the  Home 

The  other  day,  I  spoke  of  discourage- 
ments that  beset  the  way.  They  are  there 
in  plenty,  but  there  has  come  into  the 
fight  a  new  note,  that  was  missing  before. 
We  know  now  what  the  fight  means.  From 
other  quarters,  too,  help  is  coming.  Let  me 
sound  this  note  of  hope  right  here ;  there 
is  enough  of  the  gloom.  The  critics  of  my 
books  complain  that  I  am  unsystematic, 
that  I  "  put  things  in  "  as  I  think  of  them. 
Perhaps  so.  I  find  it  somehow  easier  to  put 
them  in  when  I  think  of  them  than  when 
I  don't  think  of  them.  Even  while  I  am 
about  to  show  you  how  deep  we  fell,  let  me 
remember  the  forces  that  are  coming  to 
help  us  out.  I  think  that  not  only  have 
we  turned  upon  our  track  and  seen  the 
necessity  of  making  the  most  of  this  city 
civilization  with  its  unsolved  problems, 
which  is  the  order  of  the  day ;  but  I  be- 
lieve that  we  have  reached  the  divide, 
the  point  where  the  population  shall  be 
turned  back  to  the  soil  which  it  has  been 
deserting. 


Our  Fight  for  the  Home  69 

Many  things  seem  to  me  to  tend  that 
way.  The  isolation  of  the  farm  is  disap- 
pearing. The  telephone ;  the  free  rural 
delivery  of  mails,  which  brings  good  roads, 
daily  newspapers  and  the  bicycle ;  the  con- 
centration of  rural  schools ;  a  better  grasp 
of  the  obstacles  in  the  way  of  keeping  the 
boy  on  the  farm — these  at  one  end.  At  the 
other,  the  harnessing  of  new  forces  capable 
of  transmitting  power  away  from  the  cen- 
tres of  steam  energy,  and  the  scattering  of 
the  congested  populations  to  the  suburbs ; 
means  of  transportation  that  we  knew  not 
of  a  dozen  years  ago.  It  seems  as  if  the 
very  century,  the  stamp  of  which  is  com- 
bination, concentration,  so  far  as  we  are  yet 
able  to  make  it  out,  might  have  in  store  for 
us  as  its  big  surprise  the  reversal  of  the 
process  that  characterized  its  predecessor 
and  bred  our  perplexities  :  the  drift  of  the 
population  everywhere  to  the  cities.  So 
that  when  it  seemed  in  extremest  peril,  the 
rescue  of  the  home  may  be  made  easier  than 
we  thought.     I  would  that  in  this  I  might 


yo  Oar  Fight  for  the  Home 

be  a  true  prophet !  We  can  face  the  other 
problems  of  our  day  with  confidence,  if 
the  home  be  safe  ;  for  there  we  have  backing. 
And  now  let  me  take  you  to  my  own  city, 
to  the  metropolis,  as  typical  of  most  of  the 
large  cities  of  our  country.  We  struggle 
with  the  same  evils  in  Boston,  in  Chicago, 
in  New  York,  in  Buffalo,  in  St.  Louis,  in 
Washington.  It  was  only  the  other  day 
that  I  looked  upon  some  alleys  in  the 
national  capital,  under  the  very  shadow  of 
the  big  gray  dome,  in  which  the  crowding 
was  as  vile  and  as  wicked  as  it  ever  was  in 
the  one-room  houses  of  Glasgow.  Though 
you  boast  of  less  crowding  upon  the  land 
here  in  Philadelphia,  yet  we  have  the  testi- 
mony of  your  public-spirited  men  and 
women  that  the  sanitary  condition  of  your 
alleys  is  far  from  good.  That  means  dark- 
ness and  dirt.  In  other  words,  you  are  no 
stranger  to  the  pigsty  of  which  I  spoke  as 
being  the  enemy  of  the  home  and  of 
American  citizenship.  How  came  it  about? 
What  brought  us  to  the  brink,  where,  look- 


Oar  Fight  for  the  Home  71 

ing  over,  we  see  "  all  the  conditions  "  under 
which  the  people  live  "  making  for  un- 
righteousness "  ? 

I  said  it  before  ;  but  let  the  public  records 
speak.  In  1865,  the  Council  of  Hygiene, 
pointing  to  the  tenement  slum,  said,  "  Its 
evils  and  the  perils  that  surround  it  are  the 
necessary  result  of  a  forgetfulness  of  the 
poor."  "  Evils,"  was  putting  it  mildly. 
They  came  in  the  last  analysis  to  murder, 
child  murder.  The  undertaker  and  the 
slum  landlord  divided  the  profits  between 
them.  "  Not  intemperance,  ignorance  or 
destitution  alone  causes  the  increase  of 
crime,"  was  the  report  of  a  committee  come 
down  from  Albany  in  the  fifties  to  see  what 
was  the  matter  with  New  York  ;  "  together 
they,  with  municipal  and  popular  neglect, 
find  their  soil  in  the  tenements  and  thrive 
and  develop  virulence."  The  remedy,  as 
the  committee  saw  it,  was  to  ^^ furnish 
every  man  with  a  dean  and  comfortable 
home" 

Tell   me,  what   think   you  of  "  homes " 


72  Oar  Fight  for  the  Home 

where  men  and  women  "  crowded  be- 
neath moldering,  water-rotted  roofs  or 
buTrowed  among  the  rats  of  clammy 
cellars "  ?  I  quote  that  from  a  report  of 
the  Association  for  the  Improvement  of 
the  Condition  of  the  Poor,  one  of  the  most 
conservative  and  one  of  the  wisest  of  our 
public  charities,  which,  with  unerring  in- 
stinct, saw  that  the  way  to  improve  the 
condition,  the  morals,  of  the  people  was  to 
give  them  decent  homes.  What  do  you 
think  of  cellar  *'  homes "  in  which  the 
children  had  to  stay  in  bed  till  the  tide 
fell ;  of  homes  where  children  died, 
"  smothered  by  the  foul  air  of  an  un- 
ventilated  room,"  a  windowless  room  ^ 
which  the  light  of  day  never  entered ! 
That  was  the  burden  of  a  death  certificate 
registered  in  the  Health  Department  in 
those  old,  indifferent  days.  What  think 
you  of  a  city  one-quarter  of  whose  children 

'  Since  these  lectnres  were  delivered  the  struggle  to  preserve 
the  tenement  house  law  has  developed  the  fact  that  after 
thirty -seven  years  there  are  still  over  300,000  windowless,  dark 
rooms  in  the  tenements  of  the  Greater  New  York  ! 


Oar  Fight  for  the  Home  73 

never  grew  up  to  lisp  the  sacred  name  of 
mother,  one-third  of  whose  babies  never 
reached  their  third  year,  and  one-half 
never  manhood  or  womanhood  !  That  was 
the  record  ;  and,  when  decenc}?-  came,  the 
death  rate  came  down  with  it.  Child 
murder  ceased  to  be  the  fashion.  In  thirty- 
five  years,  the  mortality  in  my  city, 
while  the  population  grew  and  grew,  was 
reduced  one-half.  I  mean,  of  course,  the 
percentage  of  deaths  upon  the  population. 
In  the  last  dozen  years,  reform  has  saved 
enough  lives  in  New  York  City  alone 
annually  to  people  a  city  of  no  mean 
proportions. 

I  must  refer  those  who  wish  to  get  at  the 
statistical  facts  to  the  reports  of  the  suc- 
cessive Tenement  House  Commissions,  or 
to  my  own  record  of  the  "  Battle  with  the 
Slum,"  in  which  I  have  tried  to  gather 
them  all.  Only  let  me  mention  here  that 
the  death  rate  of  New  York  came  down 
from  26.32  per  1,000  inhabitants,  in  1887, 
to  19.53  in  1897.     It  had  been  known  to 


74  Our  Fight  for  the  Home 

run  as  high  as  45  in  1,000  in  bad  seasons 
of  the  bad  past ;  and  in  individual  instances 
much  higher  than  that. 

What  think  you  of  "  homes,"  a  hun- 
dred under  one  roof — a  hundred  families, 
mind  you,  not  a  hundred  tenants — under 
the  roof  of  a  barrack  stamped  officially 
by  the  Health  Board  as  a  "  den  of  death  "  ? 
I  will  tell  you  what  that  Senate  In- 
vestigation Committee  of  1857  thought 
of  them :  "  The  conclusion  forced  itself 
upon  the  reflections  of  all  that  certain  con- 
ditions and  associations  of  life  and  habi- 
tation are  the  prolific  parents  of  corre- 
sponding habits  and  morals."  Aye,  they 
were.  In  that  Sixth  Ward  slum  grew  up 
the  Five  Points.  Out  of  it  came  the  pigsty 
voters  that  voted  Tweed  and  his  thieves 
into  possession  of  the  city  government,  and 
the  treasure,  for  which  we  had  paid  such 
a  price,  out  of  the  pockets  of  the  taxpayers, 
while  the  thieves  mocked  us  and  de- 
manded what  Ave  were  going  to  do  about 
it.     We   had   made   money   our   idol,  and 


Our  Fight  for  the  Home  75 

it  put  its   foot   upon   our  necks  and  trod 
hard. 

For  that  was  it.  The  only  question  that 
had  been  asked  till  then  was  :  What  would 
they  bring,  those  tenements?  The  tenant 
must  ''  pay  the  rent  or  get  out."  Indiffer- 
ence— popular  neglect — that  was  the  time 
for  pulling  it  mildly ;  for  men  of  standing, 
of  influence  in  the  community,  drew  the 
pay  that  was  the  price  of  selling  the  brother 
into  slavery.  Listen  to  this  from  the  re- 
port of  the  Council  of  Hygiene  :  "  Some 
of  them,"  meaning  the  owners  of  slum 
tenements,  ''  are  persons  of  the  highest 
character,  but  they  fail  to  appreciate  the  re- 
sponsibility that  rests  upon  them."  They 
did.  They  failed  so  signally  that,  when 
called  to  account  by  the  health  inspectors 
in  the  years  that  followed,  they  "  urged  the 
filthy  habits  of  their  tenants  as  an  excuse 
for  the  condition  of  their  property."  You 
will  hear  that  plea,  if  you  listen  long 
enough  and  closely  enough,  even  in  our 
day.     And    whenever    you    hear    it,   stop 


76  Our  Fight  for  the  Home 

right  there  and  think  who  is  to  blame 
for  the  cultivation  of  those  habits.  The 
health  inspector  of  whom  I  spoke  had  no 
doubts  upon  the  subject.  The  owners,  he 
said,  are  entirely  to  blame.  A  pigsty,  in 
time,  will  make  a  pig  even  of  man  who  is 
made  in  the  image  of  God.  You  can 
degrade  him  to  that  level  if  you  try  hard 
enough  and  are  willing  to  pay  the  price. 

They  failed  to  appreciate  their  responsi- 
bility, those  men  of  the  highest  character. 
They  did  not  fail  to  collect  the  rents  that 
sometimes  went  as  high  as  forty  per  cent, 
upon  the  value  of  their  property.  No,  but 
let  us  give  them  their  due — an  agent  col- 
lected the  rents,  they  did  not.  They  trav- 
eled abroad  ;  perhaps  they  never  saw  the 
dens  upon  the  proceeds  of  which  they  lived 
at  their  ease.  Do  you  see  what  I  am  driv- 
ing at?  Do  you  see  how  it  all,  here  as 
everywhere,  is  just  a  question  of  gold  that 
will  buy  ease  for  ourselves  !  For  gold  we 
sold  the  black  man  into  slavery,  and  for 
gold  we  let  his  white  brother  perish  in  his 


Our  Fight  for  the  Home  77 

slum.  We  were  in  a  hurry  to  get  rich  and 
we  forgot  all  else  besides  ;  forgot  the  broth- 
erhood in  our  worship  of  the  golden  calf. 
Men  have  done  it  in  all  times,  and  the 
slum  is  as  old  as  is  organized  society.  "  The 
destruction  of  the  poor  is  their  poverty." 
Whatever  else  was  the  matter  with  those 
houses,  they  paid. 

I  will  tell  you  one  thing  that  was  the 
matter  with  that  slum  where  the  home  had 
ceased  to  be  sacred,  where  the  family  ideal 
was  tortured  to  death  and  character  smoth- 
ered, where  children  were  damned  rather 
than  born  into  the  world  until  the  very 
shock  of  the  discovery  that  one  in  five  was 
killed  by  the  worst  of  the  dens  came  almost 
as  a  relief  When  the  Church  finally 
roused  itself  to  the  doing  of  its  duty  it  put 
a  long-belated  finger  upon  the  sore  spot  of 
it  all  : 

"  In  this  ward,"  said  the  Federation  of 
Churches  after  a  house-to-house  canvass, 
"  the  churches,  clubs,  schools,  educational 
and  helpful  agencies  of  every  kind  make  a 


78  Our  Fight  for  the  Home 

front  of  756  running  feet  on  the  street,  while 
the  saloons,  put  side  hy  side,  stretch  them- 
selves over  nearly  a  mile  ;  so  that  ideals  of 
citizenship  are  minting  themselves  upon 
the  minds  of  the  people  at  the  rate  of 
seven  saloon  thoughts  to  one  educational 
thought."  The  devil  had  it  in  that  ward, 
seven  to  one.  Out  of  such  an  environ- 
ment comes  the  Lost  Tenth,  the  helpless 
and  the  hopeless,  that  levy  tribute  on  our 
strength  and  our  life.  Comptroller  Coler 
showed  that  eleven  and  one-half  per  cent, 
of  all  the  money  raised  by  taxation  in  New 
York  went  to  support  poverty  and,  largely, 
pauperism,  with  the  burden  all  the  time 
increasing.  The  poverty  maps  at  our  Tene- 
ment House  Exhibition  showed  few  enough 
tenements  that  were  free  from  the  taint  of 
alms-seeking,  but  some  from  which,  in  five 
years,  seventy-five  different  families  had 
asked  public  relief  That  is  one  thing  that 
is  the  matter  with  the  slum — it  makes  its 
own  heredity.  The  sum  of  the  bad  envi- 
ronment of  to-day  and  of  yesterday  becomes 


Oar  Fight  for  the  Home  79 

the  heredity  of  to-morrow,  becomes  the  citi- 
zenship of  to-morrow.  The  lowered  vital- 
ity, the  poor  workmanship,  the  inefficiency, 
the  loss  of  hope — they  all  enter  in  and  make 
an  endless  chain  upon  which  the  curse  of 
the  slum  is  handed  down  through  the  gen- 
erations. Our  task  is  to  break  that  chain, 
unless  we  want  it  to  break  us.  We  accepted 
the  legacy  in  the  charter  of  a  people's 
rights :  life,  liberty  and  the  pursuit  of  hap- 
piness ;  and  we  must  find  the  way  to  secure 
them,  or  accept  the  alternative.  Freedom 
means  justice  to  the  people  or  it  means 
nothing ;  and  justice,  like  true  charity, 
must  begin  at  home — with  the  home. 

We  have  made  that  out  in  our  day  ;  and 
we  say  rightly  that  the  housing  question 
holds  the  key  to  most  of  the  civic  problems 
that  beset  us.  It  does  ;  but  at  bottom  it  is 
because  it  is  a  much  bigger  question  than 
of  citizenship,  even.  It  is  a  moral  question 
— not  a  question  of  "  morals,"  merely,  which 
is  akin  to  manners,  though  on  that  score  we 
have   made   headway   since   "  men   of  the 


8o  Our  Fight  for  the  Home 

highest  character "  have  abandoned  the 
owning  of  slum  tenements  for  profit — but 
the  moral  question  whether  I  shall  love  my 
neighbor  or  kill  him  ;  whether  I  shall  stand 
idly  by  and  see  my  brother's  soul  stunted, 
smothered  in  the  slum  of  my  making,  of 
my  tacit  consent  at  any  rate,  or  put  in  all 
upon  rescuing  him.  Brethren,  we  shall 
never  rescue  our  city,  you  will  never  rescue 
yours,  until  we  understand  that  that  is 
what  it  all  harks  back  to,  that  all  these 
things  mean  one  and  the  same  thing :  that 
I  am  my  hrother^s  keeper  for  good  or  for 
evil.  No  man  liveth  unto  himself  alone. 
A  moral,  a  profoundly  religious  question 
bound  up  inseparably  with  our  faith,  if  by 
it  we  mean  something  which  is  alive ;  and 
it  is  only  the  living  faith  here  that  has 
claim  upon  life  in  the  hereafter.  No  man 
who,  unmoved,  sees  his  brother  perish  on 
earth,  need  expect  a  welcoming  hand  to  be 
reached  out  to  him  from  the  skies,  if  I  read 
my  Bible  aright. 

It  is  hard  to  understand  the  attitude  of 


Oar  Fight  for  the  Home  81 

the  church,  through  all  those  weary  years, 
towards  the  people  it  was  meant  to  shep- 
herd, except  upon  the  assumption,  which 
was  a  fact,  that  it,  too,  had  been  seized  and 
carried  away  by  the  prevailing  craze,  taking 
the  thing  for  the  soul  of  the  thing.  Hand- 
some church  edifices  went  up,  with  brown 
stone  and  marble  and  carvings  without 
stint,  further  and  further  from  the  people's 
homes ;  though  not  always  as  the  record 
shows.  In  the  rear  of  Trinity  Church  and 
"  overlooked  by  the  stained-glass  windows 
of  that  beautiful  edifice,"  the  legislative 
committee,  of  which  I  spoke,  pointed,  with 
a  scorn  it  hardly  made  an  attempt  to  con- 
ceal, to  a  tenement  containing  fourteen 
families  in  which  "  filth  and  want  of  venti- 
lation were  enough  to  infect  the  very  walls 
with  disease."  As  a  matter  of  fact,  two 
epidemics  of  yellow  fever  and  of  cholera 
had  started  in  that  row.  But  whether  the 
churches  were  near  or  far,  the  people  kept 
aloof  from  them.  That  is  not  hard  to  un- 
derstand, when  I  recall  the  dive  in  William 


82  Our  Fight  for  the  Home 

Street,  with  two  stories  of  vileness  under- 
ground, that  was  known  in  the  Health  De- 
partment to  belong  to  a  New  Jersey  church 
corporation !  The  profits  were  the  devil's 
wages  and  they  went  to  pay  for  what  some 
Christians  called  God's  work  !  I  suppose 
they  persuaded  themselves — men  can  per- 
suade themselves  to  almost  anything  if  they 
want  to — that  that  was  the  reason  they  were 
not  willing  to  give  them  up,  and  they 
fought  stubbornly  the  efforts  of  the  author- 
ities to  break  up  the  dive  where  unspeak- 
able debauchery  held  high  carnival  most  of 
the  day  and  all  of  the  night.  It  is  not  hard 
to  understand,  when  there  comes  to  mind 
the  congregation  of  Christians  that  moved 
up-town  from  Mulberry  Street  and  sold  their 
old  house  of  worship  to  speculating  build- 
ers, who  converted  it  into  a  rear  tenement, 
put  a  brick  building  in  front  and  into  these 
barracks  piled  a  hundred  families,  a  total 
of  three  hundred  and  sixty  persons.  What 
kind  of  home  altars  were  there,  think  you  ? 
That   was  at   the    Five  Points  where   the 


Oar  Ftght  for  the  Home  83 

dives  were  particularly  vile,  but  I  will 
warrant  that  there  was  nothing  in  the 
saloon  in  the  front  basement  one  half  as 
bad  as  in  the  flats  in  the  rear,  where  men 
and  women  had  once  sat  and  worshiped 
their  God,  to  whose  service  they  had  dedi- 
cated that  house. 

In  1868,  the  death  rate  in  the  "Old 
Church  Tenements,"  as  they  were  called 
until  for  very  shame  we  destroyed  them,  was 
seventy-jive  per  thousand,  counting  only  those 
who  died  in  the  houses,  not  those  whose 
end  came  in  the  hospitals  to  which  those 
tenements  were  "  among  the  largest  con- 
tributors." 

Hard  to  understand  that  men  fell  away 
from  the  church?  They  must  have 
thought  that  the  Lord  had  forgotten  them  ; 
but  it  was  only  the  men  who  professed 
His  name  that  had  forgotten,  ^e  remem- 
bered. The  day  will  come,  I  hope, — I 
think  it  is  on  the  way  now, — when  we  shall 
be  permitted  to  forget  the  greatest  wrong  of 
all ;  that  it  was  a  church   corporation,  the 


84  Our  Fight  for  the  Home 

strongest  and  wealthiest,  and  alas  !  our  own, 
that,  for  its  temporal  advantage  and  to  save 
a  paltry  few  hundred  dollars,  took  up  the 
cudgel  for  the  enemy  we  were  battling  with 
and  all  but  succeeded  in  upsetting  the 
whole  structure  of  tenement-house  law  we 
had  built  up  with  such  weary  toil  in  our 
effort  to  help  the  man  to  a  level  where  he 
might  own  himself  a  man.  You  know  the 
story  of  that  and  how  bitterly  it  has 
rankled  these  many  years.  The  church 
corporation  was  a  tenement-house  owner, 
one  of  the  largest,  if  not,  indeed  the  largest 
in  the  city,  and  its  buildings  were  old  and 
bad.  It  suited  its  purposes  to  let  them  be 
bad,  because  they  were  down-town  where 
the  land  was  rapidly  getting  valuable  for 
warehouse  purposes,  and  the  tenements 
were  all  to  be  torn  down  by  and  by.  And 
so  it  was  that  it  achieved  the  reputation  of 
being  the  worst  of  landlords,  hardly  a 
name  to  attract  the  people  to  its  pews.  We 
had  got  to  the  point  in  our  fight  where 
we  had  made  good  the  claim  of  the  tenant 


Our  Fight  for  the  Home  85 

to  at  least  a  full  supply  of  water  in  his 
house,  though  light  and  air  were  yet 
denied  him  by  the  builder,  when  that 
church  corporation  chose  to  contest  the  law 
ordering  it  to  supply  water  in  its  houses, 
and  won,  for  the  time  being,  on  the  plea 
that  the  law  was  arbitrary  and  autocratic. 
They  are  all  autocratic,  the  laws  that  are 
made  for  the  protection  of  the  poor  man ; 
they  have  to  be  while  the  purpose  to  hinder 
rather  than  help  lives  in  his  brother.  We 
trembled  on  the  edge  of  a  general  collapse 
of  all  our  remedial  laws,  until  the  court  of 
last  resort  decided  that  any  such  claim  was 
contrary  to  public  policy  and  therefore  in- 
admissible. 

It  was  not  long  after  that,  that  a  distin- 
guished body  of  churchmen  in  my  city  in- 
vited me  to  speak  to  them  of  slum  evils. 
And  I  showed  them  pictures  of  the  little 
children  from  the  gutter,  until  at  last  some 
unthinking  brother  made  the  comment : 
"  Oh,  well,  they  wouldn't  wash,  if  you  gave 
them  the  chance."     Perhaps  you  can  im- 


86  Our  Fight  for  the  Home 

agine  the  result.     I  would  not  have  missed 
that  opportunity  for  a  good  deal. 

I  am  not  telling  you  these  things  to  rake 
up  forgotten  sins ;  I  am  trying  to  show 
you  whence  came  the  deadly  apathy  that 
was  to  blame  for  our  plight.  Our  con- 
science was  asleep  and  the  Church  that 
should  have  kept  it  awake  slept,  too.  We 
cannot  afford  to  forget  it  yet,  for  that  con- 
science of  ours  is  none  too  robust,  or  else  it 
is  singularly  drowsy  in  spells.  I  am  think- 
ing of  the  time,  only  a  little  while  ago, 
when  Theodore  Roosevelt  was  Police  Com- 
missioner in  New  York,  and  of  his  aston- 
ished look  when  churchmen,  citizens  from 
whom  he  should  have  expected  support, 
and  did  expect  it,  for  his  appeal  was  to 
them  direct,  came  to  him  daily  to  plead  for 
"  discretion "  in  the  enforcement  of  the 
laws  he  was  sworn  to  carry  out.  Not  all  of 
them  did  this — he  had  many  strong  backers 
among  the  clergy  and  lay-brethren — but 
too  many.  You  should  have  been  with  me 
in  those  days  and  you  would  have  under- 


Oar  Fight  for  the  Home  87 

stood  what  that  fight  was.  The  saloon  was 
the  enemy,  and,  in  a  single  week  during 
that  struggle,  it  wrecked  eight  homes  by 
tragedies,  with  which  I,  as  a  police  reporter, 
was  called  to  deal.  I  am  not  speaking  now 
of  the  numberless  tragedies  that  drag  their 
slow  lengths  through  the  years,  but  of  those 
that  reached  the  acute  stage  in  my  sight 
that  week.  Four  desperate  wives  were 
driven  to  suicide  and  two  were  murdered 
by  drunken  husbands.  One  aged  woman 
was  beaten  to  death  by  her  beastly  son  when 
she  refused  him  money  to  continue  his  de- 
bauch. And  a  policeman  was  killed  in 
the  street  by  drunken  marauders.  That 
was  the  showing ;  and  it  was  for  discre- 
tion in  dealing  with  that  enemy  those  peo- 
ple strove,  calling  the  President  of  the 
Police  Board  "  hasty."  They  were  "  men 
of  the  highest  character,  but  they  failed  to 
appreciate  the  responsibility  "  which  that 
character  imposed  upon  them. 

They   called    Roosevelt    hasty.     It   was 
time  that  some  one  got  up  some  speed  in 


88  Oar  Fight  for  the  Home 

New  York.  More  than  a  hundred  years 
ago  (to  be  exact,  in  1797)  the  legislature  of 
New  York  prohibited  soap  factories  on 
Manhattan  Island,  south  of  Grand  Street, 
in  the  interest  of  the  public  good.  Within 
seven  weeks  after  the  order  was  issued,  the 
same  legislature  amended  its  act,  giving  the 
Health  Board  discretion  in  the  premises ; 
and  the  biggest  soap  factory  in  the  land  is 
below  Grand  Street  to-day.  The  power  of 
soap  is  great. 

Do  you  know  that  article  of  discretion  in 
Philadelphia?  In  my  town,  it  has  built 
up  tenement  blocks  almost  solid,  ninety- 
three  per  cent,  covered  with  brick  and 
mortar ;  it  has  penned  tenants  in  burning 
tenements  with  stairs  of  wood  that  should 
have  been  fireproof ;  it  has  filled  the  pockets 
of  the  builder  and  wrung  the  heart  of  the 
tenant,  until,  in  despair,  he  refused  to  be- 
lieve in  either  God  or  man.  That  is  what 
"  discretion  "  has  come  to  with  us.  Oh  1 
for  red  blood  in  the  veins  of  Christians,  for 
a  muscular  faith  that,  rather  than  stand  by 


Our  Fight  for  the  Home  89 

and  see  such  things  done,  will  fight  till — 
till  some  one  dies.  That  is  the  kind  of 
faith  that  moves  the  world,  mountains  and 
all,  and  fills  the  churches !  Not  sermons, 
but  service  !  So  we  win  victories  that  tell. 
Now  do  you  wonder  that  the  common 
people,  so  deserted  by  their  best  friend, 
took  the  first  proffered  hand  held  out  to 
help  ?  To  this  multitude,  toiling  for  their 
daily  bread  until  it  fills  the  landscape  to 
the  exclusion  of  all  else,  until  time  and 
chance  are  lost  to  them  to  lift  up  their 
heads  and  get  the  wider  view — to  them, 
disheartened  and  sore,  comes  the  boss  with 
his  self-seeking  and  says :  "I  am  your 
friend."  And  he  proves  it :  he  gets  Pat  a 
job,  gets  Jim  on  the  force,  looks  after  John 
who  broke  his  leg  and  gets  him  into  the 
hospital  that  was  full ;  attends  to  Dan  when 
he  gets  into  trouble  with  the  police.  What 
more  natural  than  that  they  should  give 
him  their  votes  and  their  support?  The 
more  powerful  he,  the  better  able  to  help. 
Anyway,  is  he  not  their  friend  ?     Observe, 


go  Our  Fight  for  the  Home 

that  it  all  proceeds  on  the  neighborly  prin- 
ciple, debased  to  suit  the  slum ;  but  it  is 
still  the  idea  of  the  neighbor  :  binding  up 
the  wounds,  taking  the  man  who  has  fallen 
among  thieves  to  the  inn  and  leaving 
money  to  have  him  tended.  They  knew 
the  plan  better  than  did  we,  they  whom  we 
deserted,  churchmen  and  Christians  though 
we  were. 

What  if  the  boss  robs  the  city !  The 
poor  man,  going  home  to  his  tenement, 
overhears  the  well-dressed  citizen  comment 
upon  it  with  qualified  displeasure  :  "  Say 
what  you  will,  he  may  be  a  great  rascal, 
but  he  gets  there,  you'll  own.  And  he's 
got  the  dough."  It  is  every  one  for  him- 
self in  his  sight.  Is  it  hard  to  understand 
that  he,  too,  falls  in  with  the  scheme  ? 

And  now,  that  I  have  put  the  blame 
where  it  belongs,  let  us  turn  and  look  at 
the  other  side  of  it,  at  the  day  of  awaken- 
ing. It  was  a  long  day,  for  our  sleep  had 
been  deep,  and  it  was  not  easy  to  stay 
awake   long   at  a  time  for  a  considerable 


^s 


Oar  Fight  for  the  Home  91 

period  after  we  had  tumbled  out.  The 
Five  Points  first  aroused  us.  The  slum 
there  had  got  to  the  point  where  it  was  no 
longer  to  be  borne.  Dickens's  pen  had 
pricked  us,  and  the  warnings  of  Charles 
Loring  Brace  and  his  contemporaries  began 
to  make  us  listen.  There  followed  the 
period  of  good  intentions,  but  little  sense, 
that  gave  us  Gotham  Court  and  the  Big 
Flat.  They  were  built  as  model  tenements 
— heaven  save  the  mark !  by  men  who 
meant  well  and  did  badly.  They  are  the 
kind  to  keep  your  eye  on.  The  Big 
Flat  became  a  thieves'  runway,  because, 
unconsciously,  the  builders  had  furnished 
the  chance  by  making  it  reach  through  the 
block,  opening  upon  both  streets,  in  a 
neighborhood  where  such  a  convenience  to 
a  man  fleeing  from  the  police  was  a  regular 
windfall.  Before  its  final  destruction,  it 
achieved  the  reputation  of  being  the  worst 
tenement  in  New  York.  Gotham  Court 
was  a  close  second.  In  some  other  im- 
portant respects  that  concerned  the  home- 


92  Oar  Fight  for  the  Home 

life  of  the  people,  it  was  easily  first.  A 
sanitary  official  counted  146  cases  of  sick- 
ness among  its  thousand  tenants  in  1862, 
among  them  all  kinds  of  infectious  disease, 
from  measles  to  smallpox.  It  harbored 
one  of  the  most  notorious  gangs  that  ever 
made  lower  New  York  unsafe.  Time  after 
time,  before  it  was  torn  down,  less  than 
half  a  dozen  years  ago,  it  was  posted  as 
hopeless  and  fit  for  nothing  else.  Yet  it 
was  built  as  a  model  tenement  by  a  Quaker 
of  good  intentions.  He  certainly  did  his 
part  in  the  paving  of  that  infernal  door-yard 
that  is  said  to  be  laid  with  good  intentions 
not  backed  by  good  sense  or  hard  work. 

This  Quaker  had  a  brother  who  also  built 
houses  for  the  poor,  and,  it  is  recorded, 
meant  well,  too ;  but  the  milk  of  human 
kindness  was  soured  in  him  when  his 
neighbor,  the  alderman,  knocked  him  down 
in  a  quarrel  over  the  dividing  line  between 
their  lots.  It  was  against  the  Quaker's 
principles  to  fight,  but  he  found  a  way  of 
paying  off*  his  enemy  that  is  a  whole  volume 


The  "  Old  Church  Tenements  " 


From  "  The  Battle  ■with  the  Slum." 
Copyright,  1 901 .  by  the  Macmitlan  Company. 


Ottr  Fight  for  the  Home  93 

of  commentaries  on  graceless  human  na- 
ture :  he  built  a  tenement  upon  his  own  lot 
right  on  the  line  and  with  a  big  dead  wall 
so  close  to  his  neighbor's  windows  that  his 
tenants  could  get  neither  sun  nor  air.  They 
lived  in  darkness  ever  after.  The  fact  that, 
for  want  of  access,  his  house  was  useless 
and  stood  idle  for  years,  did  not  stay  his 
revenge.  That  old  Quaker  was  a  hater 
from  way  back.  His  "  wall  of  wrath,"  as  I 
used  to  call  it,  killed  more  innocent  babes 
and  cursed  more  lives  than  any  other  work 
of  man  I  ever  heard  of.  One  wonders  what 
that  man's  dreams  were  at  night.  The 
mere  thought  of  it  used  to  give  me  the 
shivers,  and  I  never  slept  so  sweetly  as  the 
night  when  I  had  seen  that  wall  laid  low 
by  wreckers  whom  I  had  set  on. 

Yet  it  did  not  die  in  its  sins.  I  like  to 
think  of  that.  Before  the  end  came  to 
Gotham  Court,  we  had  grown  a  real  con- 
science. The  canker  that  had  crept  in  and 
was  eating  out  the  home  and  the  heart  of  the 
people  was  arraigned  in  the  churches,  as  it 


94  Oar  Fight  for  the  Home 

should  have  been  a  long  while  before — not 
in  this  church  or  in  that  church,  but  in  the 
churches.  Christian  men  took  hold  of  the 
Court  and  did  the  most  and  the  best  with 
it  that  could  be  done, — which  makes  me 
think  that  only  yesterday  I  had  a  letter 
from  the  son  of  one  of  those  two  brothers, 
young  Bayard  Cutting,  pleading  for  support 
for  the  work  of  Bishop  Brent  out  in  the 
Philippines ;  and  it  was  as  I  would  have 
expected.  You  see,  as  I  said,  it  is  all  one 
thing.  These  men  are  among  the  strongest 
of  the  backers  of  the  movement  to  provide 
homes  for  the  poor  of  New  York,  and  have 
been  for  years ;  and  for  that  very  reason 
they  are  the  natural  supporters  of  such  a 
work  as  that  which  the  good  Bishop  is 
doing  on  that  far  foreign  shore. 

But,  as  I  said,  they  did  the  best  with  the 
Court  that  could  be  done.  The  best  was  bad, 
and  therefore  it  had  to  go.  Yet,  in  com- 
parison with  what  it  had  been,  life  even  in 
Double  Alley  had  become  comparatively 
decent  before  the  wreckers  boarded  up  the 


Gotham    Court 


From  '■^  How  the  Other  Half  Lives." 
Copyright,  iSgo,  by  Charles  Seribiier's  Sniis. 


Midnight  in  Gotham  Court 


From  "  The  Battle  with  the  Slum." 
Copyright,  1901 ,  by  the  Macmillan  Company. 


Oar  Fight  for  the  Home  95 

entrance  to  it.  There  were  homes  in  that 
alley  where  the  word  had  been  as  a  mock- 
ery before.  I  knew  of  some ;  I  will  tell 
you  the  story  of  Susie  Rocco  and  her  home. 
And  we  had  learned  something  there ;  we 
had  added  to  good  intentions  the  knowledge 
of  the  facts,  which  is  the  first  and  most  im- 
portant ingredient  in  good  sense  when  you 
come  to  deal  with  things.  I  am  going  now 
to  show  you  some  of  the  pictures  I  promised 
you,  and  you  shall  have  more  hereafter. 
Think  not  that  any  of  them  are  irrelevant 
because  they  are  of  things  that  were. 
Those  things  are  but  shadows  of  what  may 
come  again,  if  we  lose  our  grip  and  once 
more  let  our  conscience  fall  asleep,  believ- 
ing we  have  done  so  much  that  all  is  well. 
To  avoid  that,  keep  ever  a  firm  grasp  of  the 
facts.  You  will  fight  in  vain  for  the  peo- 
ple's homes  till  you  know  what  afflicts  them. 
The  glory  of  our  present-day  Christianity 
is  that  at  last  it  plants  itself  squarely  on  the 
facts — seeks  them  out  first  and  then  applies 
the  remedy.      Never  fear  them.      If  they 


0  Our  Fight  for  the  Home 

clash  in  any  way  with  scholastic  theory  or 
even  theology,  make  sure  that  they  are  the 
facts,  then  seek  the  fault  in  your  theory. 
And  always  remember  that  human  souls 
live  in  bodies.  If  you  want  to  reach  the 
soul,  you  must  reckon  with  the  man  in  the 
body  ;  or  your  preaching  will  be  vain. 

Here,  now,  is  one  of  the  Five  Points  in 
the  day  of  its  worst  disgrace  (see  illustra- 
tion facing  page  90),  but  the  Point  itself 
was  by  no  means  the  worst  of  that  neigh- 
borhood. These  adjoining  buildings,  I 
suppose  you  would  call  them  shanties,  and 

1  do  not  know  that  I  should  object  to  the 
term,  give  a  general  idea  of  the  character  of 
that  vicious  slum.  They  were  houses  sur- 
viving from  a  much  earlier  day,  built  for 
the  occupation  of  one  famil}^,  and  no  doubt 
in  that  day  there  were  homes  in  them  as 
good  as  might  be  found  anywhere.  It  was 
when  they  came  to  contain  from  ten  to 
twenty  families  each  that  the  slum  moved 
in.  With  four  families  keeping  house  in 
one  room — that  was  the  record  made  by  a 


The  Alderman's  Tenements 


Oar  Fight  for  the  Home  97 

missionary  who  had  that  district  in  charge 
— short  work  was  made  of  the  home.  I 
used  to  laugh  at  that  missionary's  story  of 
how,  when  he  asked  in  hopeless  bewilder- 
ment how  they  managed  to  get  along,  one 
of  the  tenants  said,  "  Well  enough  until  one 
of  the  other  three  took  a  boarder,  then 
trouble  began." 

But  there  was  little  enough  to  laugh  at  ; 
less  still,  when  the  big  buildings  sprang 
up  that  you  see  behind  the  shanties.  They 
are  the  double-deckers  of  to-day.  They 
were  supposed  to  be  a  *'  way  out,"  for  at 
least  they  had  room  for  the  teeming  popu- 
lations ;  but  it  turned  out  the  other  way. 
They  gave  the  home  the  hardest  blow  of  all, 
and  to-day  they  are  the  curse  that  cleaves 
to  us  for  our  sins  of  the  past,  and  with 
which  we  will  have  to  struggle  while  we  live. 
I  have  said  a  good  deal  so  far,  and  shall  have 
more  to  say  before  I  am  done,  about  murder. 
It  is  not  a  nice  word,  but  right  here  is  an 
instance  of  what  I  mean.  The  particular 
houses  that  show  in  the  picture  were  built 


98  Oar  Fight  for  the  Home 

by  one  Buddensiek,  whose  name  we  all 
came  to  know  in  the  after  years.  I  heard 
of  it  first  when  I  went  with  the  health 
inspector  to  investigate  a  complaint  of  foul 
stenches  that  was  nade  by  the  tenants  in 
those  houses.  The  explanation  proved 
simple.  The  builder  had  merely  run  the 
soil-pipe  three  feet  or  so  into  the  ground 
without  connecting  it  with  the  sewer.  That 
time  he  escaped  indictment.  It  is  somehow 
not  so  easy  to  bring  a  man  to  book  who 
poisons  his  tenants  with  bad  plumbing  as 
the  one  who  sticks  a  knife  into  his  neigh- 
bor. Some  years  after  when,  grown  bold, 
he  neglected  to  put  lime  in  his  mortar  and 
his  tenements  fell  down  and  killed  his 
workmen  before  the  tenants  got  into  them, 
the  jail  claimed  him  at  last  on  a  charge  of 
manslaughter. 

And  now  here  are  the  "  old  church  tene- 
ments "  I  spoke  of  (see  illustration  facing 
page  92) ;  upon  the  records  of  the  Health 
Department  "  among  the  largest  contribu- 
tors  to   the   hospitals "  in  the  city.      The 


•^  s 


CD 


Oar  Fight  for  the  Home  99 

cellar,  where  the  tenants  paid  two  and 
three  dollars  a  month, — that  was  before  the 
day  when  the  whole  population  of  "  cave- 
dwellers,"  more  than  five  thousand  in  num- 
ber, was  dragged  out  upon  the  street  by  the 
police  and  not  allowed  to  go  back — was  the 
old  vault  in  which  the  sexton  stored 
corpses  in  the  days  when  the  building  was 
a  church.  Do  you  wonder,  when  you  come 
to  think  of  it,  that  the  church  lost  its  grip 
upon  the  people  of  that  day,  and  that  some 
of  the  feeling  of  that  still  survives  ?  Do  you 
wonder  that  these  people  were  not  attracted 
by  a  scheme  of  salvation  that  meant  dam- 
nation in  this  life,  so  far  as  they  could  see? 
I  do  not.  Bear  in  mind  the  old  church  for  a 
little  while ;  I  shall  have  more  to  tell  you 
of  that.  That,  too,  was  atoned  for,  thank 
God! 

This  is  Gotham  Court  (see  illustration 
facing  page  94),  that  stood,  until  three  or 
four  years  ago,  almost  on  the  identical  spot 
where  George  Washington  lived  when  he 
was  the   first  President  of  this  Republic. 


100  Our  Fight  for  the  Home 

His  house  was  directly  across  the  street,  and 
in  his  day  it  was  of  course  as  fine  a  neigh- 
borhood as  there  was  in  the  city.  Within 
sixty  years  after  his  death,  the  slum  had 
moved  in.  That  tells  the  story  of  the 
mighty  strides  New  York  took  towards 
metropolitan  greatness,  and  of  the  perils 
that  hedged  in  our  path  in  the  race  for  sud- 
den wealth.  For  that  was  the  time  when 
we  forgot.  When  I  made  a  census  of  the 
Court  some  years  before  it  was  demolished, 
I  found  one  hundred  and  forty-two  families 
there.  It  happened  that  just  half  of  them 
were  Italians  and  the  other  half  the  original 
Irish,  except  that  there  were  two  German 
families  there.  Perhaps  you  can  imagine 
the  kind  of  time  those  two  German  families 
were  having.  The  process  of  displacing  the 
Hibernian  element  with  the  Italian  is  not 
altogether  a  peaceful  one,  as  the  constant 
presence  of  the  policemen  in  the  alley  bore 
witness.  It  was  an  Irishman,  of  course, 
who  told  me,  when  I  asked  him  why  the 
policeman  was  there,  that  it  was  "  all  on 


Our  Fight  for  the  Home  loi 

account  of  them  two  Dutch  families  in  the 
alley  ;  they  make  so  much  trouble  that  no 
one  can  stand  it."  Nobody  else  would 
have  thought  of  it.  I  shall  not  try  to 
describe  to  you  in  detail  what  life  meant 
in  that  place,  for  it  is  gone  now  and  I  am 
glad.  One  Christmas  when  I  was  Santa 
Claus  in  the  alley  for  the  King's  Daugh- 
ters, two  hundred  little  girls  came  out  of 
it  and  claimed  dolls  from  me.  They  might 
have  told  you.  Do  you  see  the  *'  wall  of 
wrath  "  of  which  I  spoke  ?  Wait  till  I  will 
give  you  a  better  view  of  it.  There,  now, 
are  the  Alderman's  tenements  (see  illustra- 
tion facing  page  96)  that  were  cursed  by  it, 
as  were  his  tenants  all  the  days  of  their  lives. 
But  the  wall,  too,  is  gone.  It  went  one 
Christmas,  and  in  its  fall  it  was  to  me  as  if 
I  heard  again  the  chorus  of  angels'  voices 
singing,  "  Peace  on  earth,  good-will  towards 
men."  I  had  never  heard  any  angels'  voices 
in  that  alley  before. 

Here  is  one  of  the  little  girls  who  got 
my  dolls  (see  illustration  facing  page  98), 


102  Oar  Fight  for  the  Home 

little  Susie  Rocco,  whose  story  I  promised 
to  tell  you.  Susie  was  as  good  a  girl  as  you 
can  find  in  Philadelphia,  search  where 
you  may.  Perhaps  she  was  not  very  well 
instructed  in  the  higher  ethics  of  things. 
It  may  be  that  Mrs.  Carrie  Nation  would 
not  have  approved  of  her,  because  the  work 
she  did  and  by  which  she  helped  her 
mother  run  the  household  was  pasting 
covers  on  pocket-flasks,  whiskey  flasks, 
which,  I  suppose,  come  under  the  ban 
entirely.  Susie  did  not,  I  know.  She 
was  not  concerned  about  that ;  she  was 
concerned  about  helping  her  mother,  and, 
though  I  am  no  champion  of  the  whiskey 
flask,  I  stand  with  Susie.  Her  father  was 
a  loafer  and  when  he  ran  away  at  last  and 
the  mother  fell  ill  and  Susie's  work  gave 
out,  the  evil  days  came  that  are  never  far 
away  in  a  slum  alley.  Everything  went 
to  the  pawnshop,  last  of  all  the  mother's 
wedding  ring.  I  should  have  sent  that 
first,  but  she  was  a  woman  ;  I  am  a  man. 
She  had  to  go  to  the  hospital  then ;   the 


A  "  Drunken  "  Flat 


From  "How  the  Other  Half  Lives." 
Copyright.,  iSgo,  by  Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 


Our  Fight  for  the  Home  103 

doctor  said  so.     It  was  the  only  place  where 
she  could  be  properly  cared  for. 

Susie  wept.  She  was  afraid  of  the  hos- 
pital. You  know  it,  all  of  you  who  have 
had  any  dealings  with  the  poor,  that  one 
of  their  very  real  hardships  is  that,  when 
most  they  need  that  friend,  they  are 
afraid  of  him.  Susie  could  not  bear  the 
thought.  She  cast  about  in  the  house  for 
something  that  was  yet  of  value  enough  to 
take  to  the  pawnshop,  so  that  she  might 
stay  the  evil  day,  and  she  found  my  doll. 
It  was  not  a  nice  doll  by  that  time  ;  it  was 
very  much  in  need  of  the  hospital  itself. 
But  to  Susie  it  was  precious  beyond  com- 
pare, for  was  it  not  her  doll  baby  ?  She  did 
it  up  in  a  newspaper  and  carried  it  to 
the  pawnshop  with  tears,  for  she  was  bring- 
ing the  greatest  sacrifice  of  all.  And  that 
bad  man,  when  he  unrolled  the  bundle  and 
saw  what  it  held,  smashed  the  doll  angrily 
against  the  stove  and  put  little  Susie  out 
into  the  street.  There  she  stood  and  wept, 
as  if  she  would  cry  her  eyes  out,  and  there 


104  Oar  Fight  for  the  Home 

one  of  the  King's  Daughters  found  her  ;  and 
that  was  how  I  came  to  know  Susie  and 
her  story. 

Better  days  came  for  her  and  her  mother, 
for  the  ladies  took  them  up  and  cared  for 
them.  They  were  made  happy  and  I  ought 
to  have  been,  but  I  was  not.  Let  me  confess 
it  right  here  and  have  done  with  it.  I  am 
no  scrapper  ;  I  have  too  much  else  to  do  to 
go  around  picking  quarrels  with  everybody. 
I  try  hard  to  do  as  the  Apostle  says :  "  live 
peaceably  with  all  men  as  far  as  in  me 
lies  "  ;  but  how  can  it  lie  very  far  in  any- 
body with  that  kind  of  a  pawnbroker  in 
the  landscape  ?  I  own  that  the  notion  of 
having  one  little  round  with  that  man,  just 
one  little  one,  has  charms  that  I  cannot  get 
around. 

To  this  tenement  (see  illustration  facing 
page  100)  my  business  as  a  police  reporter 
led  me.  A  home  had  been  murdered  there  : 
a  drunken  husband  had  killed  his  wife.  I 
know  it  is  a  common  belief  that  drunken- 
ness accounts  for  pretty  nearly  all  the  pov- 


In  a  Baxter  Street  Yard 


■:^^5::5«r^~:L>S»BS»«5?«»'«i( 


Shanty  Dwellings  l\   a  Tenement  Yard 


From  "  The  B.ittlc  icilh  the  Slum." 
Copyright,  igoi ,  hy  the  Maemillan  Company, 


Oar  Fight  for  the  Home  105 

erty  there  is.  I  do  not  find  it  so.  It  did 
in  this  case  and  there  are  enough  such  and 
to  spare  ;  but  I  think  the  verdict  of  the  As- 
sociation for  Improving  the  Condition  of 
the  Poor,  once  upon  a  time,  came  nearer 
the  truth,  namely,  that  forty  per  cent,  of 
the  helpless  poverty  was  due  to  drunken- 
ness, or  the  drunkenness  due  to  the  poverty. 
I  forget  the  exact  way  they  put  it,  but  that 
was  the  sense  of  it,  and  it  was  good  sense. 
Suppose  you  had  to  live  in  such  a  place  as 
this  !  (See  illustration  facing  page  102.) 
Do  you  think  human  life  would  seem 
especially  precious  or  sacred,  and  don't 
you  think  you  would  run  to  the  saloon 
as,  by  comparison,  far  the  more  decent 
and  human  spot  in  that  place?  I  know 
I  would ;  and  I  think  that  one  of  our 
worst  offenses  against  the  brother  is,  after 
letting  him  be  robbed  of  his  home  to  leave 
him  at  the  mercy  of  the  saloon  as  the  one 
place  of  human  companionship  for  him,  the 
one  humanly  decent  spot  in  all  his 
environment.     I     said     *'  letting     him    be 


io6  Oar  Fight  for  the  Home 

robbed."  There  lies  on  my  table  a  report 
of  the  Health  Department  of  the  year  1869, 
and  it  opens  at  the  page  upon  which  is  re- 
corded the  result  of  a  tour  of  the  Sanitary 
Committee  through  the  tenement  house  dis- 
tricts that  year.  They  found  that  the  land- 
lords kept  those  houses  "  as  a  business  and 
generally  as  a  speculation.  He  was  seeking 
a  certain  percentage  on  his  outlay,  and  that 
percentage  very  rarely  fell  below  fifteen  per 
cent,  and  frequently  exceeded  thirty — the 
complaint  was  universal  among  the  tenants 
that  they  were  entirely  uncared  for — the 
agent's  instructions  were  simple  but  em- 
phatic :  collect  the  rents  in  advance,  or, 
failing,  eject  the  occupant."  You  see  the 
scheme  of  the  robbery.  It  is  plain  enough. 
Out  of  such  conditions  came  little 
Antonia  Candia,  stripped  by  an  inhuman 
stepmother  and  beaten  with  a  red-hot  poker 
until  her  body  was  one  mass  of  burns  and 
bruises.  That  stepmother  went  to  jail  a 
long  while  since,  but  we  have  need  still  of 
the  services  of  the  Children's  Society  that 


Washing  in  an  Italian  Flat  ;  the  Tea  Kettle  Used 
AS  A  Wash  Boiler 


Oar  Fight  for  the  Home  107 

has  thrown  a  strong  and  watchful  arm 
around  more  than  one  hundred  thousand 
little  ones  in  the  slum  where  the  home  had 
been  wrecked.  They  are  the  ones  that  need 
our  care,  if  only  because  (I  have  said  it  before 
and  I  shall  have  yet  to  say  it  many  times) 
they  are  our  own  to-morrow.  I  remember 
the  case  of  a  bright  little  lad  in  an  East- 
side  tenement  whose  home  had  given  him 
up  to  the  street,  as  do  those  homes  right 
along.  All  day  he  carried  the  growler 
from  the  shop  where  his  father  worked  to 
the  saloon  on  the  corner,  and  when  evening 
came  he  was  missing.  It  was  Saturday  and 
he  did  not  come  home  that  night.  They 
sought  him  all  day  Sunday  in  vain.  Mon- 
day morning  when  they  opened  the  shop, 
they  found  him  in  the  cellar  where  he  had 
crept  after  drinking  of  the  beer,  and  where 
the  rats  had  found  him.  Not  even  his 
mother  could  recognize  him. 

These  are  the  ones  to  look  out  for ;  and 
the  aged  and  helpless.  Nor  need  we  marvel 
much  if  those  whose  lives  have  been  spent 


io8  Oar  Fight  for  the  Home 

in  the  crowds  turn  their  backs  upon  the 
country,  upon  the  woods  and  the  fields, 
when  we  offer  them  a  refuge  there.  The 
tenement  has  robbed  them  of  their  re- 
sources, of  the  individuality  that  makes  a 
man  good  company  for  himself  It  is  only 
a  man  who  can  think  that  is  at  home  in  the 
fields.  The  slum  never  thinks  ;  it  is  all  the 
time  trying  to  forget.  There  is  nothing 
good  to  think  of,  nothing  worth  remem- 
bering. 

These  are  ours  to  care  for.  The  tramp, 
the  lazy  man,  is  entitled  only  to  be  locked 
up.  Only  the  other  day,  I  was  invited  to 
come  to  Boston  and  join  in  a  discussion  of 
the  tramp  problem  before  a  distinguished 
body  there  ;  and  I  refused.  I  do  not  think 
there  is  a  tramp  problem  which  hard  labor 
behind  strong  bars  cannot  solve.  It  is  just 
a  question  of  human  laziness.  Save  the 
young,  and  lock  up  the  old  man  who  will 
not  work.  A  fellow  whom  I  found  sitting 
in  a  Baxter  Street  yard,  smoking  his  pipe 
contentedly,  gave  me  points  on  that.     (See 


TJ 


j^^H 

^^^E3>  ,  WR    f  ijliliir 

3^^^ 

hmiv 

^^H^HnMH^«V^  all^^B 

^■L    |g^-  '1  jP 

1     /-f^ 

^wl  ^^ 

L%3 

1^       *^  ■ 

Oar  Fight  for  the  Home  109 

illustration  facing  page  104.)  He  was  will- 
ing to  be  photographed  for  ten  cents ;  but, 
before  I  could  train  my  camera  on  him,  his 
mind  had  evolved  possibilities  not  to  be 
neglected.  He  was  smoking  a  clay  pipe 
that  had,  perhaps,  cost  a  cent,  but  I  sup- 
pose it  was  an  effort  to  hold  it  between  his 
teeth  while  I  made  ready,  for  he  made  a 
demand  for  twenty-five  cents  if  he  was  to 
be  photographed  in  character,  pipe  and  all. 

In  that  yard  were  habitations  built  of  old 
boards  and  discarded  roof  tin,  in  which 
lived  men,  women  and  children  that  had 
been  crowded  out  of  the  tenements.  (See 
illustration  facing  page  104.)  The  rent 
collector  did  not  miss  them,  however. 
They  paid  regularly  for  their  piggeries.  I 
feel  almost  like  apologizing  to  the  pig ;  no 
pig  would  have  been  content  to  live  in  such 
a  place  without  a  loud  outcry. 

Though  the  flats  in  the  tenements  were 
not  much  better.  How  strong  do  you  think 
the  home  feeling  can  be  in  a  place  where  the 
family  tea-kettle  does  weekly  duty  on  Mon- 


no  Oar  Fight  for  the  Home 

days  as  a  wash-boiler  ?  That  was  a  condi- 
tion I  actually  found  there.  (See  illustration 
facing  page  106.)  Think  of  the  attraction 
such  a  place  must  have  for  father  and  the 
boys  when  they  come  home  from  work  in 
the  evening !  We  shall  cry  out  against  the 
saloon  in  vain  until  we  give  them  some- 
thing better.  And  a  better  substitute  for 
the  saloon  was  never  offered  than  in  that 
old  legislative  committee's  prescription  : 
"  To  prevent  drunkenness  give  every  man  a 
clean  and  comfortable  home." 

They  are  worth  it,  too.  Pietro  and  his 
father  may  be  ignorant,  may  be  Italians 
(see  illustration  facing  page  108) ;  but  they 
are  here  by  our  permission,  dead  set  on 
becoming  American  citizens,  and  tremen- 
dously impressed  with  the  privileges  of 
that  citizenship.  So  anxious  are  they  to 
become  citizens  that,  if  they  can  get  there 
by  a  shorter  cut  than  the  law  allows,  you 
need  not  wonder  at  their  taking  the  chance. 
The  slum  teaches  them  nothing  that  dis- 
covers  a  moral  offense  in  that.     But  not 


Sister  Irene  and  Her   Little  Ones 


Our  Fight  for  the  Home  1 1 1 

even  the  slum  can  wipe  out  in  me  the 
memory  of  little  Pietro,  who  sat  writing 
and  writing  with  his  maimed  hand,  trying 
to  learn  the  letters  of  the  alphabet  and  how 
to  put  them  together  in  words,  so  that  he 
might  be  the  link  of  communication  be- 
tween his  people  and  the  old  home  in  Italy. 
He  was  a  poor  little  maimed  boy  with  a 
sober  face,  and  it  wrings  my  heart  now,  the 
recollection  of  the  look  he  gave  me  when  I 
plumped  out :  ''  Pietro,  do  you  ever 
laugh  ?  " 

"  I  did  wonst,"  he  said. 

The  sweaters'  fruitful  soil  is  here : 
poverty,  over-time  and  under-pay,  all  the 
conditions  that  go  to  make  child  labor  and 
to  break  up  the  home.  But  these  also  are 
our  own,  if  they  came  from  a  foreign  land. 
The  Chinaman  we  have  banished  because  he 
would  not  make  his  home  with  us,  but 
remained  ever  a  stranger.  That  was  the 
reason,  and  it  was  a  good  reason.  But 
what  sense  is  there  in  refusing  one  immi- 
grant entry  because  he  will  not  accept  an 


1 1 2  Our  Fight  for  the  Home 

American  home,  and  giving  to  the  one  who 
will  accept  it  the  slum  tenement — to  his 
undoing  and  to  ours  ? 

The  children  are  the  ones  to  look  out  for 
while  it  is  yet  time  :  the  young  and  the 
helpless.  I  spoke  of  the  foundling  babies 
that  come  from  no  one  knows  where.  The 
city  could  not  keep  them,  try  as  it  might ; 
but  there  was  one  whose  great  heart  found 
a  way.  Long  years  ago  she  sent  them  by 
hundreds  to  the  homes  far  and  near  where 
open  hearts  were  yearning  to  receive  them. 
It  is  one  of  the  things  that  make  a  man  be- 
lieve in  human  nature,  that  make  him  see 
God  in  it  in  spite  of  all,  the  fact  that  there 
are  so  many  homes  of  that  kind.  Not  in  a 
single  instance  since  the  joint  committee  of 
the  two  charitable  societies  in  New  York,  of 
whose  great  work  I  have  already  spoken, 
began  that  work,  has  a  child  in  their  care 
passed  the  age  of  two  years  without  being 
permanently  provided  for.  And  they  take 
no  chances,  but  insist  upon  the  child's  being 
a  whole  year  in  its  new  home  before  they 


Our  Fight  for  the  Home  113 

permit  its  adoption.  Sister  Irene  was  the 
one  with  the  great  heart.  There  she  stands 
among  her  little  ones.  (See  illustration 
facing  page  110.)  She  was  a  Roman 
Catholic,  and  I  was  born  a  Lutheran.  We 
could  not  very  well  be  farther  apart  on  this 
earth  ;  but,  if  the  heaven  upon  which  my 
gaze  is  fixed  has  not  room  for  both  of  us — 
if  I  shall  not  find  her  there  with  my 
sainted  mother,  why,  it  is  not  the  place  I 
am  looking  for,  and  I  do  not  want  to  go. 

I  have  preached  my  sermon  to  the  text 
of  the  wrecked  home.  I  know  of  no  more 
pitiful  spot  on  earth  than  the  almshouse 
on  Blackwell's  Island  where,  when  last 
I  was  there,  I  saw  seventeen  hundred 
old  women,  homeless  and  hopeless  in  their 
great  age,  waiting  for  their  last  ride  up  the 
Sound  in  the  "  charity  boat "  to  the  grave 
that  was  waiting  for  them  in  the  Potter's 
Field.  I  know  of  nothing  more  hopeless, 
to  all  human  sight,  unless  it  be  that  open 
trench  itself.  (See  illustration  facing  page 
112.)     Thank  God  that  there  is  the  Chris- 


114  Oar  Ftght  for  the  Home 

tian's  hope.  Even  the  trench,  with  its 
darkness  and  gloom  and  surrender,  cannot 
keep  that  which  is  born  in  heaven  and 
which,  despite  the  slum  and  its  vauntings, 
is  at  home  there  with  God. 

I  showed  you  the  Five  Points  in  its  old 
iniquity  and  told  you  to  bear  it  in  mind, 
that  I  would  come  back  to  it.  I  showed 
you  the  "  old  church  tenements  "  and  told 
you  what  they  stood  for.  Yet,  in  its  dis- 
grace, it  was  that  wicked  slum,  it  was  the 
outrage  of  that  bad  day,  that  showed  us  the 
way  out.  Where  those  tenements  stood, 
to-day  the  doors  of  the  Five  Points  Mission 
swing  daily  to  let  in  nearly  one  thousand 
children  who  are  taught  the  better  way 
there.  (See  illustration  facing  page  114.) 
The  Point  itself  has  become  Paradise  Park, 
a  playground  for  the  children  ;  and  across 
the  park  another  mission,  the  Five  Points 
House  of  Industry,  has  i-egistered  the  self- 
sacrificing  labors  of  Christian  men  and 
women  for  fifty  years.  So  that  on  earth 
there  is  hope,  too.     That  is  the  way  out. 


Our  Fight  for  the  Home  115 

Wherever  the  Gospel  and  the  sunlight  go 
hand  in  hand  in  the  battle  with  the  slum, 
there  it  is  already  won ;  there  is  an  end  of 
it  at  once. 


Ill 

OUR  PLIGHT  IN  THE  PRESENT 


Ill 

OUR   PLIGHT   IN   THE    PRESENT 

In  our  last  talk,  I  brought  you  to  the 
point,  the  turning  point,  where  our  con- 
science awoke  in  the  defense  of  the  im- 
periled home  in  the  metropolis.  We  had 
had  one  or  two  false  starts  before  we  finally 
got  there ;  as,  for  instance,  when  a  cholera 
invasion  was  threatened  just  after  the  war. 
It  was  that  which  brought  the  Council  of 
Hygiene  into  existence.  There  w^as  the 
human  disposition  to  lie  down  under  the 
"  visitation  of  God  "  and  groan,  which  sim- 
ply means  that  we  are  all  as  lazy  as  cir- 
cumstances will  let  us  be.  For  utter  use- 
lessness,  commend  me  to  the  man  who  sits 
and  prays  to  the  Lord  to  avert  the  mischief 
and  never  lends  a  hand  himself.  I  used  to 
laugh  at  an  old  deacon  out  in  my  town  on 
Long  Island,  who  had  borne  a  masterful 
119 


120  Oar  Plight  in  the  Present 

hand  in  dealing  with  the  law-breakers 
there  in  the  early  days,  and  who  when  he 
got  excited  over  the  recollection  of  the 
wickedness  of  the  past  said,  "  but  then  me 
and  the  Lord  we  took  hold  ;  "  but  the  good 
deacon  was  all  right  on  the  record.  He  did 
his  part,  stoutly  maintaining  that  it  was  the 
Lord's  work.  I  would  rather  have  one 
such  around  than  a  thousand  of  the  other 
kind.  The  Council  of  Hygiene  told  these 
people  bluntly  that  just  then  was  a  time 
to  pray,  broom  in  hand ;  and  the  cholera 
danger  was  met. 

The  real  awakening  came  a  quarter  of  a 
century  ago,  when  the  churches  came  to  the 
rescue  in  a  body.  Out  of  that  movement 
grew  the  first  genuine  model  tenement 
building  company  and  the  plan  of  "  philan- 
thropy and  five  per  cent." — that  plan  which 
must  ever  be  the  way  out.  In  the  business 
of  building  homes  for  your  brother  there 
must  be  no  taint  of  the  alms-giving  that  is 
miscalled  charity,  more  is  the  pity.  It 
must  be  an  honest  business  between  man 


Our  Plight  in  the  Present  121 

and  man,  if  it  is  to  succeed.  Out  of  that 
movement  came  our  Octavia  Hill,  Miss 
Ellen  Collins,  who  planted  homes,  in  the 
true  sense  of  the  word,  in  the  very  slum  of 
slums,  down  in  Water  Street,  where  the 
word  home  had  not  been  heard  for  so  long 
that  the  children  had  fairly  forgotten  it — 
planted  them,  too,  right  in  the  very  devil's 
preserves,  and  beat  him  out  of  sight — 
brothel,  dance-hall,  dive,  and  all — single- 
minded  and  whole-hearted  little  woman 
that  she  is  !  "  An  outlay  of  thought,"  she 
told  the  Tenement  House  Committee  of 
1894,  ''  pays  better  than  an  outlay  of 
money."  She  gave  her  thought  freely,  and 
her  heart  into  the  bargain ;  and  when,  the 
other  day,  the  longing  for  rest  came  to  her 
and  she  thought  of  letting  some  one  else 
take  her  place,  there  came  a  deputation 
from  Water  Street,  from  that  benighted 
neighborhood  that  was,  and  begged  her  to 
stay,  which  was  a  whole  volume  of  cheer 
on  our  way ;  for  it  showed  that  hearts 
throbbed  there  in  response  and  that  Water 


122  Oar  Plight  in  the  Present 

Street  had  a  soul,  the  slum  to  the  contrary 
notwithstanding.  A  deputation  that  re- 
called that  other  one,  of  which  Colonel 
Kilbourne  told  at  the  National  Conference 
of  Employer  and  Employee,  held  last  fall 
in  Minneapolis.  The  Colonel  is  the  man- 
ager of  a  company  ''  between  which  and  its 
employees  no  disagreement  of  any  kind  has 
ever  arisen."  It  was  in  the  dark  days  of 
the  panic  of  1893  that  a  deputation  of  work- 
men, with  serious  looks  on  their  faces,  filed 
into  Colonel  Kilbourne's  office  and  asked  to 
have  a  word  with  him.  And  this  was  their 
errand,  as  put  by  the  spokesman  : 

"  We  know  that  times  are  bad.  We 
know  that  your  warehouses  are  filling  up 
with  goods  which  you  cannot  sell,  and  that 
you  cannot  get  your  pay  for  the  goods  you 
have  sold.  And  yet  you  keep  us  at  work. 
We  do  not  know  what  your  circumstances 
are,  but  you  have  stood  by  us  and  we  have 
come  to  stand  by  you.  Some  of  us  have 
been  here  a  few  years,  some  of  us  many. 
We  have  had  good  pay  ;  we  have  been  able 


Oar  Plight  in  the  Present         123 

to  save  up  some  money,  and  here  it  is.  It 
is  all  yours  to  do  with  as  you  please,  if  you 
need  it  in  the  business." 

Who,  brethren,  gave  you  and  me  the 
right  to  sit  in  judgment  on  these,  or  to 
despair  of  them?  When  you  hear  men 
prate  wisely  about  ''  the  poor  coming  up  to 
their  opportunities,"  ask  Miss  Collins  what 
she  thinks  about  it  and  hear  what  she  will 
say.  The  Water  Street  houses  had  been  a 
veritable  hell  before  she  took  hold  there. 
The  dark  halls  were  a  favorite  hiding-place 
for  criminals  when  chased  by  the  police. 
It  used  to  be  said  that  if  a  thief  once  got 
into  the  hallways  of  these  buildings  there 
was  no  use  of  further  effort  to  catch  him. 
The  buildings  were  unspeakably  filthy. 
The  saloon  on  the  ground  floor  had  finally 
been  closed  after  one  of  the  bloody  fights 
that  were  the  rule  of  the  neighborhood. 
Yet  practically  the  same  tenants  are  there 
to-day  and  have  been  these  twenty  years. 
It  was  the  landlord  who  was  changed  and 
furnished  opportunities  for  the  tenants  to 


124  Oar  Plight  in  the  Present 

come  up  to.  Miss  Collins  brought  back  the 
home,  and  her  houses  became  good  and 
decent ;  the  whole  neighborhood  took  a 
turn  for  the  better,  tried  to  come  up  to  the 
ideal  that  she  set  before  it.  Miss  Collins 
came  out  of  that  awakening,  and  she  is  a 
mile-post  forever  on  the  road  out  of  the 
slum. 

St.  George's  came  out  of  it,  with  broken 
towers  it  is  true,  but  with  that  which  is 
better  than  spires  pointing  skyward  :  the 
out-and-out  declaration  that  they  might 
stay  broken  forever  while  there  were  men 
and  women  to  be  saved.  "  All  the  money 
we  can  gather,  for  flesh  and  blood ;  not  a 
dollar,  for  brick  and  mortar  !  "  Out  of  it 
came  that  call  for  men  and  women  that 
has  stirred  our  city  and  the  whole  country 
from  end  to  end  and  has  given  us  in  New 
York  forty  social  settlements  where  then 
there  was  not  one. 

The  movements  for  better  schools,  for 
neighborhood  service,  for  decent  tenements, 
for  playgrounds  for  the  children,  are  ripples 


Oar  Plight  in  the  Present  125 

of  that  great  awakening.  New  York  be- 
came a  harder  town  to  die  in  and  a  better 
town  to  live  in.  We  hear  no  more  of  fash- 
ionable women  giving  Christmas  parties  to 
their  lap  dogs ;  and  the  day  is  at  hand 
when  no  tenement  mother  shall  need  to  be- 
moan the  birth  of  a  daughter  because  of 
the  perils  and  the  shame  that  await  her. 
That  was  the  cry  that  came  to  us  from  that 
East-side  a  year  ago ;  and  that  was  why 
we  fought  to  win  ;  for  it  was  that  or  perish. 
Out  of  that  awakening  came  the  new  day 
that  reckons  with  the  tenants  as  "  souls," 
and  which  in  a  score  of  years  has  wrought 
a  change  with  us,  in  spite  of  the  odds  we 
are  battling  against,  that  caused  an  eastern 
newspaper  to  say  truly  the  other  day  that 
"  New  York  is  teaching  her  sister  cities  by 
her  old  tenements  how  not  to  build,  and  by 
her  new  how  to  build."  It  all  began  there, 
the  fight  for  the  people's  homes ;  and  now 
let  us  look  and  see  how  the  battle  goes  to- 
day. 

Here  let  me  show  you  a  tenement  house 


126  Our  Plight  in  the  Present 

block  on  the  East-side  to-day,  typical  of  a 
hundred  such  and  more.  (See  illustration 
facing  page  126.)  There  were  two  thousand 
seven  hundred  and  eighty-one  persons  liv- 
ing in  it  when  a  census  was  made  of  it  two 
years  ago,  four  hundred  and  sixty-six  of 
them  babies  in  arms.  There  were  four 
hundred  and  forty-one  dark  rooms  with  no 
windows  at  all  and  six  hundred  and  thirty- 
five  rooms  that  opened  upon  the  air-shaft. 
An  army  of  mendicants  was  marching  forth 
from  that  block  :  in  five  years  six  hundred 
and  sixty  different  families  in  it  had  ap- 
plied for  public  relief.  In  that  time  it  had 
harbored  thirty-two  reported  cases  of  tuber- 
culosis and  probably  at  least  three  times  as 
many  more  in  all  stages  that  were  not  re- 
ported. The  year  before,  the  Health  Depart- 
ment had  recorded  thirteen  cases  of  diph- 
theria there.  However,  the  rent  roll  was 
all  right,  it  amounted  to  $113,964  a  year. 

I  tell  you  these  things  that  you  ma}^  un- 
derstand the  setting  of  the  home  in  the 
greatest  of  American  cities.     Two  millions 


*    -r«A~*      '.--r-km-.\    ^-V 


A  Typical  Tenement  House  Block 


Oar  Plight  in  the  Present  127 

of  people  in  New  York  live  in  such  tene- 
ments. Do  you  see  those  narrow  slits  in 
the  roof?  They  are  the  air-shafts,  two  feet 
four  inches  wide,  sixty  or  seventy  feet  deep, 
through  which  light  and  air  are  supposed, 
in  the  landlord's  theory,  to  come  down  to 
the  tenants.  We  have  just  upset  that 
theory  and  forbidden  those  double-deckers 
with  that  kind  of  air-shaft.  There  are  to 
be  courts,  hereafter,  so  that  the  tenant  may 
have  light  enough  within  the  house,  to 
make  out  his  neighbor.  You  will  look  in 
vain  for  a  yard  for  the  children  to  play  in, 
and  I  was  going  to  say  you  will  look  in 
vain  for  a  bath-tub  in  that  block,  but  I 
was  wrong  there.  There  is  one  and  I  will 
show  it  to  you.  It  is  remarkable  enough 
to  make  a  note  of. 

It  is  upon  such  tenements  as  these  that 
the  sweat-shop  got  its  grip,  that  grip  which 
we  have  been  trying  with  such  effort  to 
shake  off,  for  the  protection  of  home  and  of 
childhood.  Directly  across  the  street  from 
there,  I  found  a  sick  man  using  for  his  pil- 


128  Our  Plight  in  the  Present 

low  a  bundle  of  half-finished  trousers  that 
were  being  made  in  the  flat.  The  man  had 
scarlet  fever.  The  label  on  the  trousers 
showed  that  they  came  from  the  shop  of  a 
Broadway  clothier,  upon  whose  counters, 
but  for  our  coming,  they  would  have  been 
displayed  without  warning  that  the  death 
warrant  of  the  purchaser  or  of  some  little 
child  in  his  family  was  basted  in  the  lin- 
ing. We  are  brothers,  whether  we  own  it 
or  not,  we  of  the  avenue  and  they  of  the 
alley. 

Here  hangs  the  bath-tub  I  spoke  of. 
(See  illustration  facing  page  128.)  The  land- 
lord did  not  provide  it ;  it  was  brought  in 
by  a  tenant  with  ambitions,  an  immigrant, 
who  thought  to  find  here  the  equality  of 
man  with  man,  of  which  he  had  heard. 
He  found  the  air-shaft  in  the  slum  tene- 
ment. Suppose  now  he  grows  political 
ideals  to  correspond  with  it ;  who  is  to 
blame  ? 

It  was  in  one  of  the  after  swells  of  the 
great  awakening  that  a  man  stood  up  in  a 


The  Only  Bathtub  in  the  Block 


From  "  The  Bat  lie  zvith  the  Slum." 
Copyright,  igoi ,  by  the  Macmillan  Company. 


Our  Plight  in  the  Present         129 

meeting  of  church  people  of  all  denomina- 
tions, gathered  to  find  an  answer  to  the 
question  how  to  bring  those  multitudes 
back  to  the  old  altars,  and  cried :  "  How 
shall  these  people  understand  the  love  of 
God  you  speak  of,  when  all  about  them 
they  see  only  the  greed  of  man  ?  "  He  was 
a  builder,  a  Christian  builder,  and  he  forth- 
with set  about  erecting  in  Brooklyn  a  row 
of  tenements  such  as  a  Christian  man  could 
build  with  a  clear  conscience.  The  River- 
side tenements  stand  there  to-day  un- 
rivaled. (See  illustration  facing  page  130.) 
It  is  much  better  to  live  on  the  yard  there 
than  in  front,  because  you  have  a  garden 
and  you  have  flowers  and  even  a  band-stand 
where  the  band  plays  sometimes  at  the 
landlord's  expense.  The  tenants  are  happy 
and  contented.  So  is  the  landlord.  He  told 
me  himself  that  he  has  had  six  and  six  and  a 
half  and  even  as  high  as  seven  per  cent,  on 
his  investment,  and  he  said  with  scorn  that 
the  talk  about  the  tenants  "  coming  up  to 
their  opportunities  "  was  the  veriest  hum- 


130  Oar  Plight  in  the  Present 

bug.  "  They  are  there  now,"  he  said,  "  a 
long  way  ahead  of  the  landlord."  Seven 
per  cent,  is  good  interest  on  any  invest- 
ment. It  almost  looks,  does  it  not,  as  if 
it  were  a  question  then  whether  a  man  will 
take  seven  per  cent,  in  providing  for  his 
brother  and  save  his  soul,  or  twenty-five 
per  cent,  and  lose  it  ?  It  is  odd  that  there 
should  be  people  willing  to  make  the  latter 
bargain ;  but,  since  there  are  such,  you 
might  almost  say  that  our  fight  with  the 
slum  is  a  kind  of  missionary  effort  to  com- 
pel them  to  take  seven  per  cent,  and  save 
their  souls  in  spite  of  themselves. 

Alfred  T.  White's  tenants  have  homes : 
he  has  made  it  possible  for  them.  Hum- 
ble homes  to  be  sure,  but  furniture  and 
show  do  not  make  the  home  of  which  I  am 
thinking,  the  home  that  is  the  prop  of  the 
Republic.  Look,  now,  upon  this  flat  in  an 
East-side  block  and  tell  me  if  you  think  that 
that  is  a  proper  setting  for  American  citi- 
zenship. (See  illustration  facing  page  132.) 
That  is  one  of  the  piggeries  I  have  spoken 


Our  Plight  in  the  Present         131 

of,  and  there  are  too  many  of  them.  Thir- 
teen persons  slept  in  that  room  where  the 
law  allowed  only  three.  In  that  neighbor- 
hood I  counted  forty-three  families  in  a 
tenement  where  the  original  builder  had 
made  room  for  seventeen.  Do  you  think 
that  is  safe  ?  And  what  must  be  the  effect 
upon  the  growing  generation  of  such  an 
environment  as  that  ? 

One  day  I  found  two  boys  in  a  back 
yard — for  a  wonder  there  was  a  back  yard 
— practicing  their  writing  lesson  on  the 
fence,  and  this  is  what  they  wrote  :  "  Keep 
off  the  grass."  I  was  thinking  the  other 
day  when  I  read  about  Pompeii  and  Mar- 
tinique that  who  knows  but  that  some  time 
this  boasted  civilization  of  ours  may  be  en- 
gulfed in  such  a  catastrophe.  Then,  per- 
haps a  couple  of  thousand  years  hence, 
when  the  scientific  men  of  that  day  are 
digging  down  to  our  buried  city,  they  will 
come  upon  one  of  those  signs  and  fetch  it 
up  ;  and  they  will  put  their  heads  together 
and  consult  and  expound,  and  then  they 


132  Ottr  Plight  in  the  Present 

will  turn  to  the  waiting  world  and  an- 
nounce that  "  the  men  of  that  day  wor- 
shipped grass  "  ;  and  they  will  not  be  so  far 
out  of  the  way,  either.  I  have  seen,  in  my 
day,  the  grass  held  to  be  tremendously 
sacred,  while  no  one  cared  about  the  boy. 
A  little  more  of  that,  and  the  slum  will 
have  set  a  stamp  upon  those  children  which 
it  will  be  hard  work  to  wipe  out. 

As  yet  you  can  do  it  with  soap  and  water 
and  patience.  Take  them  out  into  the 
open,  set  them  among  the  daisies,  and  see 
the  change.  When  they  return,  it  is  as 
if  windows  had  been  opened  for  their 
souls,  through  which  they  could  look  out 
and  see  God.  They  could  not  before.  That 
is  the  offense  of  the  slum  which  kills  the 
home,  that  it  will  not  let  either  the  one 
who  is  in  it  or  the  one  who  built  it  see 
God.  Windows  for  their  souls  !  No  need 
of  wondering  at  that  if  you  saw  the  win- 
dow giving  upon  the  dark  air-shaft  through 
which  those  children  looked  out  all  the 
days    of    their    lives    when    they    were   at 


Oar  Might  in  the  Present         133 

home  !  When  I  stood  there  with  that  har- 
assed mother,  I  asked  thoughtlessly  if  the 
five  children  I  saw  about  me  were  all  she 
had.  She  reddened  a  little  and  there  was 
a  sob  in  her  voice  as  she  said  :  "  Yes,  all 
but  Mary  ;  she  doesn't  like  to  sleep  home." 
Mary  was  seventeen.  You  would  not  have 
wondered  that  she  did  not  like  to  "  sleep 
home  "  if  you  had  been  there.  What  does 
that  tell  us  of  one  of  the  horrid  problems 
with  which  we  have  to  do  in  our  cities? 
It  all  comes  to  the  wreck  of  the  home. 

Poverty  Gap  was  one  of  the  black  spots 
that  stand  out  as  I  look  back  over  twenty- 
five  years  of  wrestling  with  the  slum.  I 
have  seldom  seen  a  more  hopeless  place. 
It  was  there  that  "  the  gang  "  murdered 
the  one  "  good  boy  "  there  was  in  the 
block,  for  the  offense  of  earning  an  honest 
living.  Yet  the  hope  there  luas  in  it  all, 
was  with  these  very  children.  There  came 
a  kindergarten  that  way  and  opened  our 
eyes.  That  is  one  of  the  functions  of  the 
kindergarten,  you  know.     It  is  the  great 


134  Our  Plight  in  the  Present 

miracle-worker  of  our  day  ;  it  has  power  to 
move  mountains  of  indifference,  of  sloth 
and  wretchedness,  of  human  inefficiency 
and  despair,  for  it  is  backed  by  the  eternal 
forces  of  faith  and  hope  and  love,  however 
much  they  may  look  to  you  or  to  me  like 
soap  and  water  and  toilsome  effort.  The 
kindergarten  came  that  way  and,  when  we 
saw  the  Gap  through  its  eyes,  we  were 
ashamed  and  set  about  tearing  it  down.  It 
was  then  that  an  inspiration  came  to  a  good 
woman  who  had  happened  upon  a  pile  of 
sand  in  the  neighborhood.  She  had  it 
brought  in  and  put  upon  the  site  of  the  old 
Gap,  with  wheelbarrows  and  pails  and 
shovels  for  the  boys  and  swings  for  the 
girls,  and  the  children  on  the  West-side  got 
their  first  playground.  "  The  gang  "  went 
out  of  business  that  summer  and  the  Gap 
that  had  been  violent  became  orderly. 

Its  steam  had  been  penned  up  before  and 
that  is  bad.  What  would  you  think  of  a  yard 
as  wide  as  an  ordinary  bedroom,  with  signs 
in  it  forbidding  the  boys  to  play  ball  there 


Our  Plight  in  the  Present  135 

and  giving  warning  that  "  all  boys  caught 
in  this  yard  will  be  delt  with  accordin'  to 
law "  ?  1  can  show  you  such  yards,  and 
wherever  they  are,  gang  violence  breaks  out, 
for  the  street  is  the  only  alternative.  There 
are  no  homes  in  such  slums  as  those. 

I  went  up  the  dark  stairs  in  one  of  those 
tenements  and  there  I  trod  upon  a  baby. 
It  is  the  regular  means  of  introduction  to  a 
tenement  house  baby  in  the  old  dark 
houses,  but  I  never  have  been  able  to  get 
used  to  it.  I  went  off  and  got  my  camera 
and  photographed  that  baby  standing  with 
its  back  against  the  public  sink  in  a  pool  of 
filth  that  overflowed  on  the  floor.  I  do  not 
marvel  much  at  the  showing  of  the  Gilder 
Tenement  House  Committee  that  one  in 
five  of  the  children  in  the  rear  tenements 
into  which  the  sunlight  never  comes  was 
killed  by  the  house.  It  seemed  strange, 
rather,  that  any  survived.  But  they  do, 
and  as  soon  as  they  are  able,  they  take  to 
the  street,  which  is  thenceforward  their 
training  ground. 


136  Oar  Plight  in  the  Present 

Some  years  ago,  the  Gerry  Society  picked 
up  two  boys  that  "  lived  nowhere,"  so  they 
said.  (See  illustration  facing  page  136.) 
They  were  brothers  with  a  drunken  father 
and  no  mother.  Some  one  was  curious 
enough  to  try  to  find  out  their  moral  and  re- 
ligious status.  The  older  of  the  two  had 
heard  of  the  Lord's  Prayer  as  something  that 
it  was  lucky  to  say  over  at  night  before  one 
went  to  sleep,  so  as  to  have  good  luck  the  next 
day  pitching  pennies  ;  his  younger  brother 
knew  the  name  of  the  Saviour  as  something 
to  swear  by.  These  were  our  home  heathen, 
growing  up  in  the  Christian  city  of  New 
York.  That  is  one  way  of  looking  at  it. 
There  is  another  for  which  we  have  to  wait 
only  a  few  years  :  then  these  lads  come  to 
the  polls  with  their  ballots,  and  there  de- 
velops the  citizen  equality  over  which  their 
father  puzzled  in  his  air  -shaft.  Ask  your- 
self the  question  again,  is  it  safe  ? 

These  boys  belong  to  the  street  and  they 
learn  its  lessons  :  gambling,  pilfering,  and 
by  and  by  robbery,     A  little  further  along 


Thev  "  Lived  Nowhere  " 


From  "  Hozi'  the  Other  Half  Lives" 
Copyright,  iiii)o,  by  Charla  Seribner's  Sons. 


Oar  Plight  in  the  Present  137 

on  the  road  they  are  traveling  are  the 
Rogues'  Gallery  and  the  jail.  At  thirteen, 
fourteen,  fifteen  and  sixteen  they  are  thieves, 
little  and  big,  house-breakers,  and  highway 
robbers.  One  year  when  I  kept  a  census  of 
the  child  criminals  I  had  to  deal  with  in 
Mulberry  Street,  I  found  them  beginning 
their  careers  at  four  and  six  years.  The 
very  little  ones  were  useful  to  their  elders  to 
"  crawl  through  a  hole  "  into  the  place  that 
was  to  be  robbed. 

Was  that  good  sense?  No,  it  was  not. 
That  came  later  when  a  man  came  into 
Mulberry  Street,  where  "  the  gang  "  was  be- 
ginning to  make  serious  trouble,  and  wanted 
to  know  if  the  boys  would  join  a  club  he 
was  forming.  Would  they  join,  those  boys  ? 
They  fell  over  one  another  to  get  there. 
The  whole  block  joined  with  a  rush.  That 
was  the  good  sense  of  the  new  day  that  lets 
the  boys  in,  instead  of  forever  warning  them 
off  from  everything  and  everywhere.  His 
club  was  a  marching  club  (see  illustration 
facing    page    138)  and  with  their  wooden 


138  Our  Plight  in  the  Present 

guns  on  their  shoulders,  that  man  could 
lead  those  boys  where  and  how  far  he 
chose ;  they  would  go  with  him  wherever 
he  went.  Just  remember  that  it  is  one  of 
two  things,  a  gun  on  the  shoulder  or  stripes 
on  the  back,  where  the  home  interposes  no 
barrier.  It  is  because  of  the  killing  off  of 
that  home  that  our  jails  are  filled  with 
young  men  from  the  big  cities. 

From  alleys  where  "  the  sunlight  never 
enters  "  comes  that  growing  procession  that 
fills  our  prisons ;  where  the  sunlight  does 
not  enter,  deeds  of  darkness  naturally  be- 
long. When  at  last  we  fully  understood 
this,  we  began  to  tear  down  the  worst  of  the 
rookeries  that  had  murdered  the  home. 
Nearly  the  worst  of  them  all  was  the  Mott 
Street  barracks.  There  were  some  six  hun- 
dred Italians  living  in  that  row  when  it 
was  at  its  worst,  and  it  was  one  of  the  few 
places  I  have  known  in  which  the  rent 
actually  rose  as  you  went  up-stairs.  There 
was  a  little  sunlight  up  there,  but  only 
darkness  and  dirt  down  below.     The  yard 


Oar  Plight  in  the  Present  139 

between  the  front  and  rear  tenement — 
think  of  calling  such  a  crack  a  yard — was 
five  feet,  ten  inches  wide.  I  remember  that 
well.  Theodore  Roosevelt  held  one  end  of 
the  tape  line  when  we  measured  it,  and  I 
the  other.  By  the  time  we  had  got  up 
indignation  enough  to  settle  with  the 
barracks,  he  had  come  into  the  municipal 
government  of  our  city  and  made  things 
go.  The  showing  upon  which  we  arraigned 
the  barracks  was,  that  during  a  season  when 
we  watched  it,  one-third  of  the  babies  there 
had  died,  killed  by  the  house.  So  we  tore 
down  the  rear  tenements,  and  when  we  did 
we  found  that  the  mortgage  on  the  prop- 
erty, with  its  awful  baby  death  rate,  was 
held  by  a  cemetery  corporation  ! 

To  me  the  barracks  seemed  as  nearly  hell 
on  earth  as  could  be  ;  but  let  me  give  you  a 
glimpse  of  the  veritable  hell  here  below. 
Whatever  you  may  think  of  the  one  here- 
after, you  need  not  doubt  its  existence 
here.  One  night,  when  I  went  through 
one  of  the  Avorst  dives  I  ever  knew,  my 


140  Our  Plight  in  the  Present 

camera  caught  and  held  this  scene  that  I 
set  before  you.  (See  illustration  facing  page 
140.)  When  I  look  upon  that  unhappy 
girl's  face,  I  think  that  the  grace  of  God 
can  reach  that  '^  lost  woman  "  in  her  sins  ; 
but  what  about  the  man  who  made  a  profit 
on  the  slum  that  gave  her  up  to  the  street  ? 
She  did  not  sleep  home,  that  was  where  the 
mischief  began.  What  about  us  who  let 
that  slum  grow  unchallenged,  and  who 
took  from  those  in  it,  with  the  home  on 
earth  the  hope  of  heaven  ?  We  need  the 
grace  of  God,  if  any  one  does.  That  is  our 
fight — for  the  home  in  which  the  girl  may 
sleep  securely,  in  which  she  will  want  to 
stay ;  thank  God !  we  are  winning  it  at 
last. 

For  see :  these  tenements  have  homes  in 
them.  (See  illustration  facing  page  142.) 
They  were  built  by  the  City  and  Suburban 
Homes  Company  with  money  subscribed 
by  Christian  men  and  women.  Foremost 
among  them  all  that  good  woman  to  whom 
we  owe  so  much  in  this  new  day  of  ours, 


0  (/> 


W 


Our  Plight  in  the  Present         141 

the  wife  of  Bishop  Potter.  They  are  called 
the  Alfred  Corning  Clark  Buildings,  and 
stand  in  West  68th  and  69th  Streets,  in  that 
neighborhood  where  the  "  social  ideals 
minted  themselves  upon  the  lives  of  the 
people  at  the  rate  of  seven  saloon  thoughts  to 
one  educational  thought."  The  plan  of  the 
City  and  Suburban  Homes  Company  is  that 
of  philanthropy  and  five  per  cent.  They 
limit  their  income  to  five  per  cent.,  and 
have  so  far  received  four.  Their  tenants 
are  happy,  as  well  they  may  be,  and  the 
owners  have  good  cause  to  be  the  same. 
They  have  done  us  a  very  notable  service 
in  their  work ;  since  those  houses  were 
built,  others  have  been  added  and  pro- 
vision made  for  some  fifteen  or  sixteen 
hundred  families.  Four  per  cent,  on  such 
an  investment  is  enough  to  settle  it  in  the 
sight  of  us  all  that  real  homes  can  be  pro- 
vided for  the  multitude  even  on  Manhattan 
Island,  and  therefore  must  be  ;  also,  that 
the  slum  landlord  must  stop  building 
houses  that  kill  his  tenants ;  that  murder 


142  Oar  Might  in  the  Present 

is  murder,  whether  it  is  done  with  an  axe 
or  with  a  house. 

I  should  like  to  tell  you  of  that  godless 
municipal  "  charity "  which  herded  old 
thieves  and  old  tramps  and  young  homeless 
lads,  who  were  adrift  in  the  great  city,  in 
those  vile  dens  called  police  station  lodging 
rooms,  and  of  the  war  upon  it  that  was  won 
at  last ;  but  I  have  written  so  much  and  so 
often  about  it,  and  about  my  own  experi- 
ence in  one  of  those  dens,  where  I  was 
beaten  and  robbed,  and  where  my  little  dog 
was  killed,  when  I  was  a  homeless  boy  my- 
self, and  I  have  not  the  time  to  repeat  it. 
You  have  fought  that  same  fight  in  Phila- 
delphia and  won  it,  too.  Our  battle  went 
dead  against  us,  until  that  man  with  honest 
purpose  came  among  us  and  set  things 
right.  I  shall  never  forget  the  night  he 
and  I  spent  in  touring  the  police  stations 
together  until  we  brought  up  in  the  Church 
Street  station,  where  the  thing  happened  of 
which  I  have  just  spoken.  Standing  there, 
I  told  him  my  story  and  he  cried  angrily, 


Our  Plight  in  the  Present         143 

"  Did  they  do  that  to  you  ?  I'll  smash 
them  to-morrow."  And  he  did.  And  so 
that  foul  disgrace  came  to  an  end.  Thank 
God  for  Theodore  Roosevelt ! 

There  remained  the  awful  nuisance  of 
the  cheap  lodging  houses  in  the  Bowery, 
where  thieves  recruit  their  broken-up  gangs 
among  the  young  men  who  are  stranded 
there,  coming  from  everywhere  out  in  the 
country.  They  have  a  standing  army  of 
lodgers,  from  thirteen  to  sixteen  thousand 
homeless  men  and  lads ;  and  we  knew  not 
what  to  do  with  them,  until  there  arose 
among  us  a  philanthropist  who  gave  of  his 
fortune  to  solve  this  problem  also.  He 
gave  a  million  or  more,  and  gave  so  wisely 
that  his  work,  the  great  Mills  houses,  have 
become  one  of  the  real  benefactions  of  to- 
day. There  are  two  of  them  and  they 
shelter  a  constant  population  of  twenty-six 
hundred  lodgers.  They  are  so  well  man- 
aged that  they  return  a  profit,  even  a  very 
good  profit,  upon  the  investment.  So  they 
are  free  from  the  taint  of  almsgiving  and 


144  Oar  Plight  in  the  Present 

the  man  who  lives  in  them  can  and  does 
keep  his  self-respect.  Mr.  D.  O.  Mills 
deserves  a  place  among  the  real  benefactors 
of  our  day. 

I  am  to  speak  to  you  next  of  the  to-mor- 
row. Here  it  sits  in  a  wagon,  two  of  the 
children  of  the  poor  whose  only  playground 
is  their  father's  truck.  (See  illustration  fac- 
ing page  144.)  "  Was  "  I  should  have  said. 
I  took  their  picture  before  the  day  of  Colonel 
Waring,  and  when  they  stepped  out  of  the 
truck  they  landed  in  a  street  where  the  mud 
was  over  half  a  foot  in  depth.  You  never  saw 
anything  like  it,  and  pray  that  you  never 
may.  We  solaced  ourselves  with  the  belief 
in  those  days  that  no  one  could  clean  our 
streets,  that  it  was  an  impossible  job.  That 
was  the  day  of  the  man  who  ''  can't,"  or 
rather  who  won't.  When  one  of  the  other 
kind  came  with  his  broom,  he  gave  the 
children  their  first  playground,  though  it 
was  not  a  good  one,  and  his  broom  swept 
some  of  the  cobwebs  out  of  our  heads  at  the 
same  time.     "  A  man  instead  of  a  voter  be- 


The  "  To-morrow  " 


From  "  The  Children  of  the  Poor." 
Copyright,  i8g2,  by  CkarUs  Scribner's  Sons. 


Our  Plight  in  the  Present         145 

hind  every  broom,"  that  was  his  watch- 
word, and  it  cleaned  our  streets  and  cleaned 
our  politics  for  a  season.  Just  remember 
it ;  it  applies  to  other  kinds  of  dirt  than 
that  which  lies  in  the  street. 

The  children  got  a  playground,  but  not 
the  kind  they  needed.  We  had  to  put  our 
hands  deep  into  our  pockets  to  give  them 
that.  Over  on  that  East-side,  where  three 
hundred  and  twenty-four  thousand  persons 
were  penned  up  upon  seven  hundred  and 
eleven  acres  of  land,  out  of  reach  and  out 
of  sight  of  a  green  spot,  we  tore  down  block 
after  block  of  old  buildings,  paying  a 
million  dollars  for  each  block,  and  making 
the  best  bargain  of  our  lives  in  doing  it. 
It  was  marvelous  how  long  it  took  us  to 
see  that  this  was  good  sense,  and  we  were 
not  alone  in  that,  either.  A  year  ago,  when 
I  spoke  in  this  city  about  children  and 
their  rights,  I  was  shown  a  square  that 
had  been  laid  out  as  a  playground  for  the 
little  ones,  but  that  was  wholly  neglected 
and   gone   to   wreck.      That  was  not  good 


146  Our  Plight  in  the  Present 

sense.  I  looked  for  better  among  the  people 
of  Philadelphia  where  Benjamin  Franklin 
lived ;  and  I  expect  to  find  it,  too. 

The  Mulberry  Bend  we  laid  by  the  heels  ; 
that  was  the  worst  pigsty  of  all,  and  here 
again  let  me  hark  back  to  the  murder  I 
have  spoken  of  so  often.  I  do  not  believe 
that  there  was  a  week  in  all  the  twenty 
years  I  had  to  do  with  the  den,  as  a  police 
reporter,  in  which  I  was  not  called  to  record 
there  a  stabbing  or  shooting  affair,  some  act 
of  violence.  It  is  now  five  years  since  the 
Bend  became  a  park  (see  illustration  facing 
page  146),  and  the  police  reporter  has  not 
had  business  there  once  during  that  time  ; 
not  once  has  a  shot  been  fired  or  a  knife 
been  drawn.  That  is  what  it  means  to  let 
the  sunlight  in  and  give  the  boys  their 
rights  in  a  slum  like  that ! 

Of  this  boy  of  the  slum  we  shall  speak 
together  further.  He  is  just  what  you  let 
him  be  :  good,  if  you  give  him  the  chance ; 
bad,  if  you  will  have  none  of  him.  Take 
the  home  out  of  his  life,  and  you  handicap 


Our  Plight  in  the  Present         147 

him  forever  and  mortgage  your  own  future 
with  the  heaviest  of  mortgages.  It  is  since 
that  understanding  began  to  dawn  upon  us 
that  we  have  seized  playgrounds  right  and 
left,  wherever  we  had  the  chance.  I  have 
in  mind  one  which  we  got  away  from  a  cor- 
poration on  the  West-side — it  goes  a  little 
hard  with  me  to  own  that  it  was  a  church 
corporation,  because  by  that  time  the  church 
ought  to  have  had  better  sense.  It  was  an 
old  burial  ground  where  some  of  the  old- 
time  New  Yorkers  lay  who,  in  their  day, 
neglected  their  boys  and  gave  us  the 
heritage  of  the  slum.  I  hope  that  they 
have  seen  their  mistake :  I  am  sure  they 
have,  and  that  their  ears  are  rejoiced  by 
the  patter  of  little  children's  feet  where 
once  there  was  the  silence ;  for  they  are 
echoing  the  better  to-morrow,  those  little 
feet. 

I  wish  I  had  time  to  tell  you  the  whole 
story  of  what  we  have  learned  as  to  that 
in  these  last  ten  years,  but  it  is  too  long. 
Let  it  be  enough  to  say  that,  wherever  we 


148  Our  Plight  in  the  Present 

have  destroyed  the  slum  that  killed  the 
home  and  given  the  children  a  chance, 
there  order  has  moved  in  where  violence 
and  gang  rule  were  before,  and  the  police 
are  having  a  vacation.  We  are  extending 
that  program  of  ours  right  and  left.  Seven 
years  ago  we  had  not  one  school  playground 
in  New  York  ;  now  we  have  a  law  which 
says  that  never  another  public  school  shall 
be  built  without  an  outdoor  playground  for 
the  children.  And  we  have  been  building 
more  than  three-score  new  and  splendid 
schools  since  then.  Some  of  these  schools 
have  the  playgrounds  on  the  street,  and 
some  on  the  roof,  and  in  the  latter, 
last  year,  Mayor  Low's  Board  of  Edu- 
cation put  brass  bands  in  the  summer 
evenings  during  the  long  vacation,  and 
invited  in  the  neighborhood.  If  you  have 
any  doubts  about  the  millennium's  coming 
nearer,  you  should  have  been  there  then. 
It  seemed  to  me  when  I  saw  three  thousand 
children  dancing  to  the  tune  of  "  Sunday 
Afternoon  "  on  top  of  the  school  that  had 


Oar  Plight  in  the  Present         149 

been  used  so  long  as  a  kind  of  jail  in  which 
to  lock  them  up  for  the  convenience  of  some 
one  who  wanted  to  get  rid  of  them — it 
seemed  to  me  then,  as  if  we  had  put  on 
seven  league  boots  in  the  race  to  distance 
the  slum  and  the  janitor.  Both  of  them  lost 
their  grip  on  those  children  then  and  there, 
and  for  all  time;  though  the  janitor  strove 
hard  against  fate.  He  tried  to  drive  them 
away  with  a  club  when  we  were  not  look- 
ing ;  and  when  he  was  caught  at  that,  he  re- 
ported that  those  roof  playgrounds  were  no 
good :  they  were  too  hot  in  summer  and 
too  cold  in  winter.  So,  it  would  appear,  is 
most  of  the  rest  of  the  earth. 

However,  his  day  is  past  and  the  chil- 
dren's is  coming.  The  school  of  the  new 
day  is  "  built  beautiful,"  quite  like  a  palace, 
and  our  women  hang  the  walls  of  the 
class-rooms  with  handsome  pictures  that 
open  windows  for  the  souls  of  the  little 
ones,  who  sit  and  look  on.  There  are  still 
some  growlers  who  think  that  the  money 
put  into  handsome  stone  and  wrought  iron 


150  Our  Plight  in  the  Present 

and  polished  wood  is  wasted.  They  are 
wrong  ;  we  never  made  a  better  investment, 
unless  it  be  in  the  playgrounds  which  are 
part  of  those  schools.  All  these  things  help 
to  restore  ideals.  What  is  the  matter  with 
the  slum  is  that  it  lacks  ideals.  Where  they 
are  made  to  grow,  there  comes  the  irresist- 
ible demand  for  the  home  that  is  the  es- 
sence of  good,  and  then  we  are  on  the  home 
stretch. 

Our  vacation  schools  gather  in  the  boys, 
to  teach  them  sloyd  and  how  to  handle 
useful  tools  (see  illustration  facing  page  150), 
and  the  girls  to  teach  them  cooking  ;  and, 
on  alternate  days,  the  men  and  boys  and 
the  women  and  girls  are  taught  swimming 
at  our  public  baths.  Over  on  the  West- 
side,  where  one  of  our  neighborhood  parks 
is  being  laid  out,  the  Park  Department 
even  went  into  teaching  the  young  lads 
truck-farming  last  summer.  From  that 
sort  of  school  no  one  "  plays  hookey."  We 
shall  shortly  have  no  truant  question  at  all, 
or,  if  we  do,  we  shall  be  in  a  position  to 


Oar  Plight  in  the  Present  151 

deal  with  it  easily,  for  there  need  be  no 
quibbling  about  the  proper  disposal  of  the 
lad  who  deserts  the  school  of  the  new  dis- 
pensation. 

I  once  found  a  little  fellow  picking  bones 
and  rags  under  an  ash  dump,  the  only 
home  he  knew  being  a  vile  shed  under 
that  pile  of  rubbish.  That  dump  was 
in  the  identical  spot  where  now  one  of 
our  new  recreation  piers  extends  into  the 
North  River.  If  he  had  been  left  there, 
to  grow  up  as  he  could — and  he  could 
neither  read  nor  write — he  would  have 
grown  naturally  into  the  tough  who  says 
that  the  world  owes  him  a  living,  which 
he  is  bound  to  collect  as  easily  as  he  can, 
especially  without  any  work.  It  is  a  lie  ; 
the  world  owes  no  man  a  living.  It  is  like 
a  bank  upon  which  you  draw  according  to 
the  amount  of  work  you  put  into  it  and  no 
more.  But  the  boy  was  not  left  there,  and, 
as  I  said,  the  dump  that  cursed  his  life  has 
been  replaced  by  a  park  and  a  play-pier. 
The  band  comes  there  in  the  evening  and 


152  Our  Plight  in  the  Present 

the  crowds  from  the  tenements,  young  and 
old ;  and,  on  the  long  summer  days  in  the 
vacation  season,  the  kindergartner  comes 
and  gathers  her  class,  and  there  in  the  open 
they  study  with  one  another  the  first  les- 
sons of  the  new  political  science  that  shall 
draw  us  closer  together  and  restore  to  us 
the  neighborly  feeling,  and  the  lost  home 
with  it. 

When  we  build  our  altar  on  that  ground, 
we  shall  hear  no  more  of  empty  churches. 
The  life  has  come  back.  How  great  was 
the  yearning  for  it,  none  of  us  may  ever 
know.  The  other  day,  a  little  lad,  watch- 
ing the  lighted  Christmas  tree  in  a  settle- 
ment in  my  city,  whispered  anxiously  to 
the  head-worker  when  the  distribution  of 
presents  began  :  "  Shall  we  not  worship 
the  tree  ? "  No,  but  we  shall  worship 
together,  they  and  we,  God  in  the  hearts 
that  were  at  last  opened  to  let  them  in — to 
let  the  lost  neighbor  in — in  His  name. 

Here  they  come,  an  army  with  banners 
to   help   us  win   the  fight  for  the  home  I 


Our  Plight  in  the  Present         153 

They  are  the  children  of  the  very  poor, 
sometimes  too  ragged  to  attend  the  public 
school,  and  sometimes  kept  out  because 
they  do  not  know  our  language.  They  are 
the  children  of  foreigners  who  brought 
them  here  that  they  might  live  in  a  free 
land,  at  once  the  only  and  the  greatest  heri- 
tage they  could  leave  them.  If  you  doubt 
that  they  are  on  our  side  in  the  fight,  go 
and  hear  them  salute  the  flag  in  the  morn- 
ing (see  illustration  facing  page  152),  prom- 
ising "  our  hearts,  our  heads  and  our  hands 
to  our  country — one  country,  one  language, 
one  flag !  "  And  never  doubt  or  distrust 
them  again,  for  to  do  so  is  to  distrust 
God,  whose  children  they  are,  even  if  we 
rejected  them,  and  to  reject  the  republic 
which  is  to  be  His  means  of  bringing  us 
together  again. 


IV 

OUR  GRIP  ON  THE  TO-MORROW 


IV 

OUR    GRIP   ON   THE   TO-MORROW 

In  concluding  these  lectures,  I  wish  first 
of  all  to  extend  to  Philadelphia  my  hearty 
thanks  for  the  ready  and  patient  hearing 
she  has  given  to  this  fight  for  the  American 
home,  upon  which  all  depends.  The  great 
audiences  that  have  attended,  whether  in 
church  or  hall,  are  in  themselves  the  best 
guarantee  that  the  fight  will  be  won,  that 
the  to-morrow  is  safe.  There  is  needed  only 
the  strong  and  informed  public  opinion 
that  sees  clearly  the  peril,  to  set  a  barrier 
against  the  inroads  of  the  slum.  Without 
that  we  fight  in  vain.  If  Philadelphia  or 
Boston  or  Connecticut  were  to  be  deaf  to 
the  evils  of  sweating,  we  should  be  power- 
less against  them  in  New  York,  or  vice 
versa.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  public  opin- 
ion from  the  Mississippi  to  the  Hudson 
157 


158       Oar  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow 

condemns  tenement-made  goods,  their  mar- 
ket will  be  gone  and  our  fight  won.  The 
protest  of  Oshkosh  against  the  home 
conditions  that  degrade  manhood  and 
womanhood  in  New  York  is  registered  at 
Albany  in  a  hundred  echoes  from  my  own 
state  and  makes  our  annual  struggle  with 
the  selfish  interests,  that  for  profit  seek  to 
sacrifice  the  home,  so  much  easier.  We 
shall  win,  I  know  it ;  for,  in  my  own  time, 
I  have  seen  this  protest  against  the  aban- 
donment of  the  brother  swell  from  scat- 
tered voices  here  and  there  to  an  angry 
chorus,  that  first  shamed  decent  men,  who 
did  not  know,  out  of  the  owning  of  slum 
tenements,  and  afterwards  drove  Christian 
men,  who  did  know  and  who  cared,  too, 
into  it  with  the  result  that  we  have  seen. 
We  shall  win  the  fight — indeed  !  I  have 
spoken  to  little  purpose  if  you  do  not  see 
with  me  that  we  owitst  win  the  fight  for  the 
people's  homes,  if  we  would  live  as  a 
nation. 

And  now  this  to-morrow  !     Let  me  bring 


Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morroiv       159 

you  face  to  face  with  it  as  it  confronted  me 
one  day,  years  ago,  in  East  16th  Street  di- 
rectly opposite  St.  George's  Church.  It 
stood  there  in  the  person  of  a  ragamuffin, 
typical,  in  his  rags  and  dirt,  of  his  kind 
and  quite  in  the  character ;  for  he  was  en- 
gaged in  slinging  mud.  He  dug  it  out  of 
the  gutter  by  the  fistful  and  distributed  it 
impartially  all  over  the  church  across  the 
way.  Why  the  church,  I  wondered  as  I 
watched  him.  He,  the  boy,  had  no  stouter 
friend  than  its  stalwart  rector.  Why  then 
throw  mud  at  his  church  ?  I  went  up  to 
ask  and  for  once  he  was  taken  unawares. 
I  was  upon  him  before  he  saw  me  and  put 
my  hand  upon  his  shoulder !  and  that  mo- 
ment I  knew  what  I  wanted  to  know,  what 
ailed  the  lad.  The  years  that  have  passed 
have  added  many  details  to  the  record  of 
his  case,  but  nothing  of  the  first  impor- 
tance. It  was  all  clear  to  me  that  instant ; 
for  he  turned  like  a  hunted  wild  beast,  his 
fistful  of  mud  gripped  tight,  to  confront  the 
enemy — it  could   be  nothing  else.     In  all 


i6o       Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morroiv 

his  dreary  little  life  no  hand  had  ever  been 
laid  upon  his  shoulder  in  kindness.  That 
was  the  story.  That  is  the  story  too  often 
yet.  Every  man's  hand  raised  against  him, 
his  was  raised  against  the  world  that 
would  have  none  of  him.  It  was  self-de- 
fense.    I  saw  it  and  was  dumb. 

Presently  I  remembered  that  I  had 
started  to  interview  him,  and  asked  ques- 
tions. He  did  not  answer  them,  but  his 
looks  were  more  eloquent  than  words  ;  and, 
at  the  hard  places,  another  street  Arab,  a 
degree  less  dirty  and  less  spiteful  than  he, 
ventured  responses  that  let  in  the  light. 
Read  and  write  he  could  not,  never  went  to 
school.  I  stared  at  that ;  visions  of  truant 
officers,  of  compulsory  education  laws,  rose 
up  before  me.  I  little  knew  then  the  true 
condition  of  things — it  was  years  after  that 
that  our  first  school  census  showed  us 
fifty  thousand  children  in  the  street  who 
should  have  been  on  the  school-benches,  but 
were  shut  out  for  lack  of  room.  What  did 
he   know?     Nothing.     But,   said    I    impa- 


Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morrcnv       161 

tiently,   what    can    he    do,    what   does   he 
do? 

"He?"  said  the  other  boy  with  a  con- 
tempt for  my  lack  of  understanding,  which 
he  made  no  effort  to  conceal,  "  He  throws 
stones  !  "  And  mud.  That  was  all,  all  we 
had  taught  him  in  his  apprenticeship  of 
the  street,  his  preparation  for  the  citizen- 
ship that  was  to  come.  That  was  our  end 
of  the  story. 

We  have  been  busy  since  making  in- 
quiries concerning  this  lad  who  is  our  to- 
morrow. We  have  been  at  work  among  the 
underpinnings  to  see  how  fared  the  props 
upon  which  we  build  character,  citizenship 
— the  same  thing  in  the  end.  When  the 
test  comes,  they  are  convertible  terms. 
And  the  props  were  not  there — they  were 
gone !  What  had  become  of  them  ?  I 
have  shown  you  how  beset  is  the  home 
whence  came  the  boy  who  throws  the  mud. 
There  is  no  stronger  prop  under  the  char- 
acter that  forms  in  the  growing  boy  than 
his  home.     The  tenement  is  a  destroyer  of 


i62       Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow 

home  and  of  character,  of  the  individuality 
that  makes  character  tell.  A  homeless  city 
— a  city  without  civic  pride,  without  citizen 
virtue,  a  despoiler  of  children,  a  destroyer 
of  the  to-morrow. 

Did  I  tell  you  of  my  friend  whose  house 
stands  in  a  garden  with  a  sand-heap  in 
which  the  children  dig  and  romp  with  their 
cat  and  the  kittens  and  the  terrier  dog? 
Of  how  the  dog  will  try  to  smother  a  kitten 
now  and  then  in  an  opportune  sand-hole, 
with  the  children  ever  on  the  watch  to  avert 
the  threatened  catastrophe?  And  of  how 
they  did  avert  it,  until  one  unlucky  daj^ 
they  found  a  dead  kitten  in  the  sand-heap. 
Whereupon  the  little  girl  rushed  into  her 
mother's  presence  with  it  in  her  apron  and 
cried  out  indignantly  : 

"  There,  mamma,  a  perfectly  good  cat 
spoiled ! " 

Just  so  with  these  children  of  the  tene- 
ment. Perfectly  good,  as  good  as  any  on 
the  avenue  with  the  brown  stone  mansions, 
they   are    spoiled   in   the   tenement   house 


Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow       163 

slum,  and  the  loss  is  ours,  an  irreparable 
loss.  The  chief  prop  under  the  character 
of  the  growing  boy  is  gone.  Nothing  can 
replace  it ;  nothing  ever  does. 

The  school  is  another.  How  about  the 
lad's  school  ?  The  census  of  which  I  spoke 
told  us  that  story  seven  years  ago ;  and  we 
were  surprised.  It  would  have  been  more 
to  the  point  had  there  been  no  cause  for 
surprise.  Two  chief  props  of  the  to-mor- 
row, of  the  state — the  home  and  the  school 
— and  both  neglected !  Fifty  thousand 
children  in  the  street  who  should  have 
been  in  school  !  Where  the  prop  had  not 
been  knocked  out,  what  had  our  neglect 
made  of  it  ? 

I  remember  my  efforts  to  catechize  a 
sewing  class  of  girls,  all  out  of  the  public 
school,  on  the  subject  of  Napoleon,  of  whom 
there  was  a  big  picture  on  a  poster  just 
across  the  street.  Not  one  of  them  knew 
who  he  was.  They  thought  the  picture 
was  of  some  wild  west  show  character, 
Buffalo  Bill  perhaps.     Yes,  there  was  one 


164       Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow 

who  "  believed  she  had  heard  of  the  gen- 
tleman before."  She  said  it  timidly  and 
was  evidently  not  sure  that  she  might  not 
be  doing  an  injury  to  some  innocent  citizen 
who  might  rise  and  object.  This  was  what 
she  had  heard  "  that  he  had  two  wives." 
Not  that  he  was  a  great  general,  not  that 
he  was  a  soldier,  a  lawgiver,  a  ruler,  a 
leader  of  men  ;  but  that  he  had  two  wives. 
It  was  Napoleon  scaled  down  to  the  level 
of  the  slum. 

We  found  out  what  our  neglect  had  made 
of  the  public  school  when  three  applicants 
for  appointment  as  policemen  under  Theo- 
dore Roosevelt  wrote  in  their  examination 
papers  that  five  of  the  thirteen  states  that 
formed  the  union  were,  "  England,  Ireland, 
Wales,  Belfast,  and  Cork  "  !  Another  wrote 
that  Lincoln  was  murdered  by  Ballington 
Booth !  We  had  made  our  public  schools 
into  stuffing  machines.  Where  they  should 
have  taught  the  young  to  think,  the}^ 
jammed  them  full  of  all  sorts  of  things 
that   made   manikins   of  them — not   men. 


Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morroio       165 

And  the  "  truants  "  we  made  by  slamming 
the  school-doors  in  their  faces,  we  took  and 
locked  up  in  a  jail  behind  iron  bars,  with 
burglars  and  thieves  and  bad  boys  of  every 
kind,  and  divided  them  there — not  into  the 
good  and  the  bad ;  not  into  the  sheep  and 
the  goats,  remembering  that  in  mingling 
them  there  was  fearful  danger,  for  how 
should  the  young  burglar,  bursting  with 
pride  in  his  exploit,  keep  from  bragging  of 
it  to  his  admiring  side-partner  ? — not  that 
way  were  they  classified,  with  a  sense  of  the 
peril  of  such  a  contact,  but  into  squads 
according  to  height :  four  feet,  four  feet 
seven,  and  over  four  feet  seven  I  That  was 
how  we  ran  our  school  machinery,  without 
sense  or  soul ;  and,  where  there  is  neither, 
character  does  not  grow.  That  prop — the 
school — was  gone,  knocked  out  from  under 
the  boy,  the  to-morrow. 

However,  we  have  done  our  best  to  put 
it  back  since  we  made  out  how  badly  off  we 
were,  for  we  understand  at  last  the  peril  of 
that.      Our   schools  are  every  day  getting 


i66       Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morrcrw 

nearer  to  the  ideal  school  that  turns  out 
men  and  women  who  think,  to  do  the  work 
of  the  world.  The  reformatory  I  spoke  of 
is  no  longer  guilty  of  such  outrages  upon 
common  sense.  It  is  to-day  leading  the 
way  in  an  attempt  to  restore,  as  nearly  as 
possible,  family  life  and  family  training  in 
home  groups,  instead  of  the  deadening 
institution  life,  to  the  children  whose 
greatest  misfortune  was  that  they  never 
knew  home  in  the  saving  sense  while 
they — and  we — could  so  easily  have  been 
saved. 

And  now  here  is  a  prop  which,  certainly 
during  a  most  critical  period  of  the  boy's 
life,  should  stand  ahead  even  of  the  school. 
I  mean  his  play.  Froebel,  the  great  kinder- 
gartner  who  gave  us  the  best  legacy  of  the 
nineteenth  century  to  its  successor,  said  that 
play  is  "  the  normal  occupation  of  the  child 
through  which  he  first  perceives  moral 
relations."  Upon  this  truth  and  the  other, 
that  the  child  "  learns  by  doing,"  he  built 
his  whole  common  sense  system,  which  we 


Oar  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow       167 

now  know  to  be  the  right  beginning  of  all 
education,  whether  of  rich  or  poor.  How 
have  we  dealt  with  this  strong  bulwark  ? 
As  sacredly  should  it  be  guarded  as  the  right 
of  habeas  corpus  ;  the  one  is  not  of  greater 
moment  to  the  commonwealth  than  the 
other.  You  cannot  make  a  good  citizen 
out  of  the  lad  whom  you  denied  a  chance 
to  kick  a  ball  across  lots  when  that  was  his 
ambition  and  his  right.  I  have  said  it  be- 
fore :  it  takes  a  whole  boy  to  make  a  whole 
man. 

How  did  we  guard  this  bulwark  of  play  ? 
In  the  chief  city  of  the  land,  up  to  half  a 
dozen  years  ago,  the  lad  had  not  one  r)lace 
where  he  might  play,  safe  from  the  police- 
man. Not  a  single  playground  was  there, 
even  on  that  East-side  where  half  a  million 
tenants  were  pent  up  in  the  big  barracks, 
out  of  sight  and  reach  of  a  green  spot.  Not 
a  school  was  there  with  a  playground  be- 
longing to  it.  Yes !  there  was  one ;  over 
behind  the  public  school  in  First  Street  was 
a  little  patch  in  the  middle  of  the  block 


i68       Oar  Grip  on  the  To-Morrcnv 

that  had  once  been  a  graveyard,  but  had 
become  a  mere  litter  of  tin  cans  and  ash- 
heaps.  It  took  three  years  and,  I  think, 
as  many  legislative  bills  to  obtain  this 
sorry  boon  for  the  living ;  but,  when  it 
was  at  last  made  into  a  playground,  the 
"  gang  "  in  that  block  went  out  of  business. 
What  became  of  it  ?  Where  did  it  go  ?  To 
school,  probably.  That  school  became  the 
most  popular  one  on  the  East-side,  and  the 
most  orderly. 

For  all  that,  however,  this  playground 
long  remained  the  only  one.  It  took  years 
to  make  us  see  what  a  clear-headed  man 
across  the  sea  had  made  out  many  years 
before ;  namely,  that  crime  in  our  large 
cities  is,  to  an  unsuspected  extent,  a  ques- 
tion of  athletics  merely — of  giving  the  boys 
a  chance  to  play  when  that  is  what  they 
need.  Boys  are  like  steam  boilers  with 
steam  always  up  :  the  steam  has  to  have  a 
safe  outlet,  or  it  will  find  an  unsafe  one. 
Boilers  have  safety-valves  with  which  it  is 
best  not  to  meddle.     The  boy's  safety-valve 


Oar  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow       169 

is  his  play.  Let  the  landlord  hang  up  his 
sign  in  the  yard  that  he  will  have  no  ball 
playing  there,  and  let  the  policeman  refuse 
the  lad  the  chance  to  play  in  the  street, 
which  is  a  bad  place  to  play  at  best — let 
these  two  sit  on  the  boy's  safety-valve,  and 
you  need  not  marvel  at  the  explosion  you 
will  hear.  You  can  read  of  it  in  the  papers 
every  day  :  such  and  such  a  "  gang  "  way- 
laid the  policeman  on  their  beat  last  night 
and  beat  him  with  his  own  club.  It  is 
nothing  to  marvel  at,  no  special  depravity ; 
it  was  just  the  boiler  that  went  bang. 

That  was  the  way  we  safeguarded  that 
prop  under  the  boy,  who  is  father  to  the 
man,  and  we  reaped  as  our  reward  crooked 
citizenship.  New  York  is  but  the  type  of 
the  rest  of  our  cities  in  this  as  in  so  much 
else.  We  are  at  last  taking  the  kinder- 
garten seriously ;  here  and  there  "  play- 
schools "  are  being  opened  in  the  long  sum- 
mer vacations.  In  New  York,  we  have 
built  half  a  dozen  play-piers  out  into  the 
river,   where   the   little  ones  dance  to  the 


lyo       Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow 

music  of  brass  bands  in  the  evening.  I 
told  you  how  we  put  brass  bands  up  on  the 
schoolhouse  roofs  and  invited  the  neighbor- 
hood in.  Boston  has  "  play-rooms  "  for 
indoor  fun  in  crowded  neighborhoods.  We 
shall  yet  have  "  play-houses "  for  the 
children's  use  as  well  as  for  the  grown 
folk  ;  but  it  is  still  a  running  fight.  Twice 
in  the  past  year  have  I  been  appealed  to  to 
help  save  the  kindergarten  from  ignorant 
town  boards,  who  could  not  see  what  good 
there  was  in  it  that  the  people  should  be 
taxed  for  its  support.  The  dawn  of  com- 
mon sense  has  set  in,  but  it  will  be  some- 
time yet  to  the  broad  daylight. 

There  are  other  props  which  we  have 
hardly  recognized  as  such.  There  is  the 
respect  for  law  that  means  respect  for  the 
majesty  of  the  commonwealth,  of  the  state. 
What  have  we  made  of  that  ?  Of  the  com- 
pulsory education  law,  until  within  the 
last  half  dozen  years,  we  made  a  laughing 
stock.  Of  the  factory  law,  said  a  legislative 
committee  that  looked  us  over,  we  made  a 


Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow       171 

mess  of  perjury  and  child  labor.  The 
excise  law  became  a  vehicle  of  blackmail 
and  corruption.  This  is  how  we  tended 
that  prop,  forgetting  that  to  bring  contempt 
upon  the  law  is  the  shortest  cut  to  civic 
cynicism,  which  is  a  death-blow  to  the  re- 
public :  it  lives  but  in  the  people's  hopes 
and  high  ideals. 

The  very  enforcement  of  law  has  some- 
times seemed  a  travesty :  the  boy  who 
steals  fifty  cents  is  sent  to  the  house  of  cor- 
rection ;  the  man  who  steals  a  railroad  goes 
free.  So  the  lad,  robbed  of  every  chance 
and  with  the  fact  dinned  into  his  ears  un- 
ceasingly by  those  Avho  would  make  capital 
of  his  plight,  takes  to  the  street  and  throws 
stones  and  mud  at  the  order  of  society  that 
gave  him  no  show  ;  at  the  church,  with  its 
pride  and  pomp ;  at  the  citizen  in  a  good 
coat  and  a  silk  hat ;  at  the  policeman,  when 
his  back  is  turned  and  he  is  far  enough 
away ;  at  anything  that  stands  for  the 
order  of  society  in  which  he  was  allowed 
no  place. 


172        Oar  Grip  on  the  To-Morrozu 

Need  we  wonder  at  it?  Need  we  cavil 
at  this  lad  who  chitches  at  the  very  last 
straw  in  vain — the  father's  help  and  coun- 
sel that  means  so  much  to  the  growing 
boy?  Too  often  relations  between  father 
and  son  are  reversed,  and  the  father  must 
depend  on  the  boy  for  communication  with 
the  strange  world  around  him.  He  is  and 
remains  a  stranger,  never  even  learning  the 
language ;  the  boy  is  born  to  it  and  to  the 
new  ways  that  prove  a  stumbling-block  to 
his  father.  He,  the  father,  is  an  Italian,  a 
Greek,  a  refugee  Jew — he  is  "  Dutch." 
That  sums  it  all  up.  He  is  "  Dutch  "  and 
he  is  "  slow,"  and,  in  the  inevitable  con- 
flict between  the  old  and  the  new,  the  boy 
escapes  to  the  street  and  to  the  gang. 

Come  now  with  me  to  the  reformatory 
and  look  at  their  records.  Three-fourths 
of  the  young  men  who  land  there  are 
"  without  moral  sense "  yet  "  of  average 
mental  capacity,"  which  is  to  say  that  they 
had  the  common  sense  to  benefit  by  their 
opportunities  had  we  put  any  in  their  way  ; 


Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morroiv       173 

but  we  did  not.  See  how  all  but  eight  or 
nine  in  a  hundred  had  bad  homes,  or  homes 
which,  at  all  events,  had  no  influence  for 
good  upon  their  lives.  But  in  this  it  is 
emphatically  true  that  that  which  is  not 
for  is  against.  Unless  the  home  is  a  saving 
influence  in  the  lad's  life,  the  door  has 
been  opened  for  all  that  is  bad  and  corrupt- 
ing. More  than  ninety  per  cent,  were 
adrift  at  the  age  when  character  is  formed. 
And  only  one  in  a  hundred  escaped  bad 
company  !  ^  The  street  has  no  other  kind 
of  company  and  the  street  is  the  alternative 
of  the  home. 

There  is  your  heredity  made  to  order  for 
you — to  your  order — the  heredity  of  the 
slum ;  for  the  heredity,  under  which  we 
groan,  ever  ready  to  give  up,  to  lay  the 
blame  on  the  Almighty  for  our  shortsight- 
edness, our  selfishness  and  love  of  ease, — 
this  heredity  is,  in  ninety-nine  cases  out 
of  a  hundred,  just  the  sum  of  the  bad 
environment  which  it  was  in  our  power  to 

'  See  Year  Book  of  Elmira  Reformatory. 


174       Oar  Grip  on  the  To-Morrcyw 

mend  if  we  had  but  minded  it  while  it  was 
time.  The  hundredth  case  we  can  leave  to 
the  Lord,  who  punishes  the  sins  of  the 
fathers  upon  their  children  only  in  them 
that  hate  Him.  To  those  who  would  do 
His  bidding,  His  work  in  the  world.  He  is 
every  ready  to  show  a  way  out.  The  way 
is  to  keep  His  commandments,  the  old,  and 
the  new  that  sums  up  all  the  rest.  Loving 
our  brother,  we  shall  not  have  the  heart  to 
leave  him  in  the  slough  ;  we  shall  be  want- 
ing to  fight  all  the  things  that  drag  him 
down,  and  so  we  shall  be  mending  not  only 
his  chances  in  the  to-day,  but  we  shall  be 
cutting  off  the  heritage  of  sin  and  sorrow 
and  failure  that  would  blight  the  to-morrow. 
We  shall  have  lifted  the  curse  that  was  laid 
upon  man  for  forgetting  his  brother — for 
whoso  forgets  his  brother  hateth  Him,  that 
is  what  it  means — and  shall  have  helped 
the  kingdom  to  come  upon  earth,  even  as 
it  is  in  heaven  above.  By  helping  men 
to  live  the  life  of  men,  we  shall  bring  them 
nearer    to    Him    whose   children    we   are. 


Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morrcnv       175 

That  is  our  heredity,  the  only  real  one : 
that  we  are  children  of  God !  With  that 
backing,  who  can  falter?  What  is  there 
that  you  and  I  cannot  do  ?  And  how  dare 
we  refuse  to  do  it? 

"  Weakness  is  what  ails  the  young 
criminal,  not  wickedness,"  say  the  prison 
superintendent,  the  prison  chaplain,  every 
one  who  knows.  Lack  of  character,  that  is. 
How  could  he  grow  a  character  in  such 
a  setting  as  his  ?  And  for  this  setting  we, 
not  he,  are  responsible.  He  could  not  help 
himself.  Think  what  it  was  we  wasted  ! 
Only  the  other  day  the  head- worker  of  one 
of  the  social  settlements  in  New  York  told 
me  of  a  little  Jewish  boy  in  her  care,  a 
little  chap  of  eight,  whose  home  is  in  a  tene- 
ment where  the  father  works  early  and  late 
to  make  ends  meet,  his  darling  ambition 
that  his  boy  shall  some  day  be  a  rabbi ;  but 
the  little  fellow  threw  consternation  into 
that  household  by  declaring  that  he  would 
not  be  a  rabbi  when  he  grew  up,  and  why  ? 
"  Because,"  he  told  my  friend,  "  I  do  not 


ly^       Oar  Grip  on  the  To-Morr<yu) 

believe  I  could  ever  think  of  words  beauti- 
ful enough  to  speak  to  God  in."  Out  of  a 
slum  tenement !  How  you  would  cherish 
it  forever  if  your  little  one  were  to  lift  his 
soul  and  yours  up  to  God  with  such  a 
speech  !     Diamonds  in  the  dust,  truly. 

I  remember  the  "  Kid  "  they  brought  to 
police  headquarters  handcuffed  to  two  po- 
licemen whom  he  had  tried  to  kill  when 
they  came  upon  him  robbing  a  store.  If 
ever  there  was  a  tough,  he  was  one.  And 
yet  when  they  brought  him  out  from  the 
detective  office,  where  he  had  had  his  pedi- 
gree taken  and  been  photographed  and 
hung  in  the  Rogues'  Gallery  as  the  first 
stop  on  his  way  to  the  jail  and  to  the  gal- 
lows, there  was  something  underneath  the 
hard  crust  that  spoke  to  me  of  the  image 
of  God  in  which  he  was  made.  Overlaid 
by  the  slum,  yes  !  hopelessly,  you  might 
have  said ;  but  there  is  no  such  thing  as 
hopelessness  where  the  spark  of  His  life  is. 
It  may  be  quickened  at  any  moment.  It 
needs  only  the  right  thing  to  strike  fire, 


Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow       177 

and  that  thing  is  always  the  same.  Love 
of  God  ?  He  did  not  know  what  it  was. 
He  would  have  spurned  you  away  had  you 
come  to  him  with  it  on  your  lips.  But 
when,  five  minutes  later,  a  cry  of  horror 
went  up  on  Broadway  where  a  little  tod- 
dling baby  had  strayed  out  upon  the  rail- 
road track  with  a  runaway  car  not  ten  feet 
from  the  child,  who  crowed  with  delight  at 
the  sound  of  the  bell  which  the  gripman 
banged,  sick  with  dread,  for  he  was  power- 
less to  stay  the  car — when  we  stood  frozen 
to  stone  with  the  despairing  shriek  of  that 
mother  whom  men  were  holding  back 
while  they  turned  their  heads  away,  with 
her  cries  ringing  the  doom  of  the  child  in 
our  ears — when  there  seemed  no  help  on 
earth,  then  it  was  the  "  Kid "  who  tore 
himself  from  the  grasp  of  the  policemen 
and  sprang  upon  the  car-track,  saving  the 
child  at  the  risk  of  his  own  life  a  thousand 
times  over !  Thief,  tough,  indexed  and 
hung  in  the  Rogues'  Gallery ;  started  fair 
for   the  jail   and  the  gallows,  he  did  not 


lyS       Oar  Grip  on  the  To-Momyw 

hesitate.  The  peril  of  the  innocent  child 
struck  the  spark,  and  the  image  came  out 
which  the  slum  had  tried  to  smother. 
Plenty  there  are  who,  had  they  seen  him, 
would  not  have  thought  it  was  there ;  for 
there  are  other  things  beside  the  slum  that 
bury  it  deep,  too  deep  for  the  spark  to 
struggle  through  :  too  good  a  time,  over- 
indulgence, selfishness,  for  instance.  It  is 
not  the  first  time  that  men  have  sought 
the  Lord  in  the  high  places  in  vain.  The 
wise  men  found  Him  cradled  in  the  stable 
with  the  dumb  beasts,  and  they  worshiped 
Him  there. 

There  was  Fighting  Mary.  She  earned 
her  name  ;  that  tells  the  story.  A  pupil  on 
occasion  in  the  Industrial  School  of  the 
Children's  Aid  Society  on  Seventh  Avenue, 
she  had  acquired  such  a  reputation  as  a 
battler  with  the  gangs  of  the  neighbor- 
hood, that  it  seemed  like  putting  a  premium 
on  bad  conduct,  I  suppose,  to  bid  her  to  the 
Thanksgiving  dinner ;  but  better  counsel 
prevailed,   and  she  was  allowed  to   come. 


Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow       179 

And  when  she  saw  the  little  mince  pie  at 
her  plate — a  whole  pie,  the  first  and  onl}'- 
one  in  her  desolate  life,  though  nothing  was 
farther  from  her  mind  than  thoughts  of 
desolation,  with  several  unsettled  scores  on 
hand — her  whole  childish  soul  went  out  to 
it.  She  caressed  it  tenderly,  felt  of  it, 
sniffed  its  sweet  fragrance,  and,  when  every 
sense  was  satisfied  except  the  one  that  the 
children  all  about  her  were  gorging,  she 
crammed  it,  as  carefully  as  she  might,  all 
warm  and  pulpy  as  it  was,  into  her  dress 
pocket.  The  boys  saw  it  and,  encouraged 
by  the  presence  of  strangers,  jeered  a  little  ; 
not  very  loudly,  for  they  knew  the  penalty 
well ;  but  she  heard  it  and,  with  one  of  the 
looks  before  which  the  "  gang  "  had  quailed 
before,  she  said  just  this  :     "  For  mother." 

That  was  all ;  but  it  brought  the  tears  of 
penitence,  of  sorrow  and  of  gladness  to  the 
eyes  of  the  good  women  who  thought  once 
of  shutting  her  out  as  quite  beyond  hope. 
Before  that  day's  sun  set,  they  did  what  they 
could   to   undo   the   wrong  by  adopting  a 


i8o       Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow 

resolution  that  has  since  stood  upon  the 
records  of  all  the  twenty  schools  and  more 
of  the  Children's  Aid  Society :  that  occasions 
of  mince  pie  shall  carry  double  rations  al- 
ways, one  for  Mary  and  one  for  mother ! 

These  are  the  children  whose  backs  we 
have  been  loading  with  the  heredity  of  the 
slum,  of  ignorance,  of  homelessness.  There 
came  to  me  the  other  day  a  letter  asking  me 
to  be  present  at  the  fiftieth  annual  meeting 
of  that  Children's  Aid  Society,  which  has 
in  all  these  years  been  trying  to  break  the 
bonds  of  the  slum  by  taking  the  children 
from  it  and  planting  them  out  on  the  West- 
ern fields  where  they  may  grow  in  the  sun- 
light. And  grow  they  did  ;  at  the  meeting 
to  which  I  was  invited,  three  governors 
were  to  be  present,  two  elected  by  the  peo- 
ple in  their  states  and  one  territorial  gover- 
nor appointed  by  the  president ;  and  all 
three  of  them  were  once  bare-legged  little 
raggamuffins  taken  from  the  slum  of  New 
York  ! 

No  hope  ?     No,  there  will  be  none  for  us, 


Oar  Grip  on  the  To-Morrotv       181 

unless  our  eyes  are  opened  speedily ;  for  it 
does  not  end  here.  We  can  choose  whether 
we  will  make  of  the  lad  in  the  slum  a 
governor  or  a  thief ;  and  we  shall  have  to 
foot  the  bill  here,  if  we  choose  the  bad  end. 
But  there  is  another  reckoning  coming  for 
smothering  God's  image  in  a  human  soul. 
Somebody  has  got  to  foot  that  bill,  too,  and 
it  will  not  be  the  boy.     He  was  the  victim. 

The  boy  sees  the  choice  we  are  making. 
He  sees  us  building  jails  when  we  should 
have  built  schools,  though  the  schools  are 
many  times  cheaper  any  way  one  looks  at 
it.  If  he  has  heard  that  I  am  my  brother's 
keeper,  he  must  conclude  upon  the  evi- 
dence that  it  means  jail-keeper  ;  and,  in 
disgust  and  derision  at  our  lack  of  sense,  he 
throws  stones  and  mud.  And  who  shall 
blame  him  ?  Not  I.  I  joined  him  long 
ago,  only  I  throw  ink  ;  but  the  idea  is  the 
same.     The  boy  has  been  foully  dealt  with. 

And  foolishly !  Where  it  would  have 
been — is — so  easy  to  form  character,  we 
have  been  laboring  with  such  infinite  toil 


i82       Oar  Grip  on  the  To-Morrcnv 

to  reform  it.  It  would  have  formed  itself 
had  we  left  the  boy  the  home,  for  that  is 
where  character  grows.  The  loss  of  it 
thrust  a  hundred  problems  upon  us  of  find- 
ing props  to  take  its  place.  All  the  labor  of 
forty  years  has  been  directed  to  that  end. 
The  fresh  air  holidays  are  one,  and 
how  strong  a  one,  how  sadly  needed,  he 
may  know  who  hears  the  child  cry  out 
upon  his  first  sight  of  God's  open  fields, 
'*  How  blue  the  sky  is,  and  how  much  there 
is  of  it !  "  Not  much  in  his  slum  alley  ! 
*'  The  fresh  air  holiday,"  said  a  woman 
doctor  who  has  labored  all  her  life  among 
the  poor  in  my  city,  "  is  a  strong  plaster  for 
our  social  ills."  And  so  it  is.  Some  day, 
I  hope  to  see  the  touch  from  my  old  home, 
the  neighborly  Danish  touch,  added  to  it 
for  the  good  of  us  all.  There  they  ex- 
change ;  the  boys  from  the  city  go  out  to 
the  country  to  be  made  over,  and  the 
lads  from  the  farms  are  taken  to  town  by 
their  teachers  to  see  its  wonders  and  to 
come  nearer  to  the  history  of  their  country 


Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow       183 

that  is  written  there.  So  they  feel  more 
like  what  they  are  in  fact,  neighbors  who 
can  pull  together  all  the  better  because  they 
are  no  longer  strangers.  They  have  been 
introduced  to  one  another.  That  idea  is 
worth  considering.  In  our  great  country, 
we  need  to  pull  together  in  the  days  that 
are  coming  even  more  than  in  the  past. 
There  is  enough  to  pull  us  apart. 

The  boys'  club  is  another  prop.  It  is  the 
key  to  the  boy  that  heads  off  the  "  gang  " 
and  the  reformatory  that  lurks  behind  it. 
In  the  beginning,  it  grew  out  of  a  mission- 
ary's great  heart,  and  wherever  there  is 
heart  in  it  one  boys'  club  is  worth  a  thou- 
sand policemen's  clubs  in  the  fight  with 
the  slum.  The  boys  were  breaking  the 
windows  of  the  mission  house  in  Tompkins' 
Square  and  the  police  could  not  drive  them 
off.  The  missionary's  wife  knew  a  plan, 
however :  she  invited  them  in  to  have 
coffee  and  cakes.  That  was  the  gospel  in 
practical  form  for  Tompkins'  Square,  and 
the  first  boys'  club  that  grew  out  of  that 


184       Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morrcnv 

meeting  has  to-day  an  army  of  members 
which  no  building  is  big  enough  to  house  ; 
and  Tompkins'  Square,  that  was  once  given 
over  to  rioting,  to  "bread  or  blood"  pro- 
cessions, has  become  orderly  and  peaceful. 
The  last  of  the  anarchists  over  there  has 
taken  to  keeping  a  beer  saloon  and  accumu- 
lating property.  We  have  grafted  the  boys' 
club  upon  the  public  school  and  we  never 
did  anything  better. 

The  kindergarten  is  such  a  prop,  and 
the  cooking  class  is  another — never  a 
stronger  in  the  fight  with  intemperance, 
that  thrives  upon  bad  cooking  at  home  as 
upon  nothing  else.  The  whole  reformed 
school  is  building  new  underpinnings  for 
the  lad  who  has  so  long  been  left  to  him- 
self. We  have  replaced  the  three  R's  with 
the  three  H's — the  head,  the  heart,  and  the 
hand.  We  are  at  last  teaching  the  children 
to  think.  We  are  nearly  where  we  can 
vote  six  millions  of  dollars  for  public 
schools  as  readily  as  for  a  battleship. 
When  we  get  to  where  we  can  do  it  without 


Oar  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow       185 

a  tremor,  we  shall  be  fairly  on  the  home- 
stretch. As  yet  we  shudder  at  the  great 
sums  ;  but  they  are  the  opportunities  of  our 
greatness,  over  which  Ave  must  learn  to  re- 
joice more  than  over  fine  ships,  mighty 
railroads,  vast  wheat-fields,  territorial  ex- 
pansion and  a  full  treasury ;  because,  if 
they  are  not  heeded,  these  other  things  are 
but  so  many  temptations  and  traps  for  our 
stumbling  feet. 

The  social  settlement  is  of  all  the  substi- 
tute props  the  strongest.  It  takes  all  the  rest 
into  its  plan  to  help ;  and  it  goes  to  the 
home,  which  is  the  kernel  of  all,  and  tries 
to  help  there  with  neighborly  touch.  That 
is  the  cure.  Greed  and  selfishness  killed 
the  home ;  human  sympathy  only  can 
bring  it  back.  "  My  brother  "  is  the  word 
that  has  healing  for  all  our  social  ills.  The 
settlement  has  been  compared  to  a  bridge 
upon  which  men  go  over,  not  down,  from 
the  mansion  to  the  tenement ;  for  a  bridge 
must  be  level  to  be  good.  There  was  a 
time  when  men  went  down  to  that  work,  or 


i86       Oar  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow 

shot  down  their  coal  and  their  groceries,  as 
if  through  a  coal  chute,  in  contemptuous 
settlement  of  brotherhood  arrears.  That 
did  not  work.  The  crop  we  raised  from 
that  was  hatred  and  helplessness.  But  the 
personal  touch  can  redeem  even  free  soup ; 
and  if  there  is  anything  more  hopeless 
than  that  I  do  not  know  it.  I  am  told 
that  here  in  Philadelphia,  where  it  unac- 
countably survives,  it  is  coupled,  after  all, 
with  kindly  inquiry  and  personal  interest, 
serves  as  a  means  of  opening  the  door 
merely.  It  is  a  bad  key  ;  but,  if  that  is  the 
use  it  is  put  to,as  I  am  told  by  a  venerable 
Quaker  who  confronted  me  sternly  with 
the  question,  "  Jacob,  why  did  thee  say  in 
thy  book  that  in  Philadelphia  common 
sense  appears  to  be  drowned  in  soup  ?  " — 
if  that  is  the  way  of  it,  I  am  willing  to 
condone  even  free  soup,  otherwise  out- 
lawed as  hopeless.  It  was  never  the  way 
in  my  city. 

So,  whichever   way   we   turn,   we   come 
back  to  the  commandment :    "  My  children, 


Oar  Grip  on  the  To-Morroiv       187 

love  one  another."  Doing  that,  we  can 
leave  the  results  with  Him  who  said  it. 
But  we  can  make  them  out  even  now.  We 
can  see  how  things  are  beginning  to  tend 
back  towards  the  home  where  love  grows 
naturally  in  the  family.  The  neighbor- 
hood idea,  that  is  the  heart  of  the  settle- 
ment movement,  rouses  civic  pride,  rouses 
ideals  that  were  dead,  restores  to  the  neigh- 
borhood individuality  and  to  the  family 
dignity.  The  mothers'  club,  what  does  it 
mean,  what  does  it  discuss,  but  home-mak- 
ing? The  home  library  brings  the  visitor 
to  the  home,  picks  it  out  and  gives  it 
separate  existence,  and  ties  the  children  to 
it  with  a  new  loyalty.  The  boys'  club  be- 
longs there  in  its  ultimate  development  and 
will  yet  go  there  for  its  meetings,  and  the 
girls'  club  too.  That  must  be  the  ultimate 
aim  of  the  settlement,  which  is  now  pre- 
paring the  ground  for  it.  Everywhere, 
consciously  or  unconsciously,  the  move- 
ment is  in  the  air,  and  growing,  to  rescue 
the   home  from  neglect,  to  put  a  stop  to 


i88       Oar  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow 

child-labor  and  to  home-work  that  would 
exclude  the  family  life ;  the  movement  to 
send  mother  and  children  back  to  the 
home  where  they  are  safe. 

You,  in  Philadelphia,  have  ./our  Octavia 
Hill  Association,  that  has  shown  us  how  to 
redeem  a  whole  street.  I  have  told  you  of 
our  efforts  in  our  worse  slum.  It  is  so 
everywhere.  I  am  my  brother's  keeper, 
and  I  am  ashamed  at  last  not  to  own  it. 
That  is  the  key-note  of  the  Avhole  modern 
reform  movement,  the  new  charity,  the  new 
school,  the  social  settlement  and  all ;  and 
thank  God  for  it ! 

How  long  we  Avere  finding  out  that  we 
were  neighbors  !  A  year  or  two  ago,  I  went 
to  a  suburb  of  New  York  to  speak  of  these 
things,  even  as  I  am  now  speaking  to  you. 
And  when  that  evening  I  sat  at  the  family 
board  with  my  host,  Avho  was  a  clergyman, 
a  secretary  in  a  foreign  mission  board,  he 
said,  looking  around  upon  his  little  ones, 
that,  if  I  could  find  him  a  poor  widow  in 
the   city   with  five  children  of  their  ages, 


Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morrow       189 

whom  they  could  go  along  with  and  help  as 
they  grew,  I  would  be  doing  a  good  thing 
for  them  and  a  better  thing  for  his  children. 
And  I  promised,  for  that  was  ideal  charity, 
neighbor  wi  h  neighbor. 

But  it  was  not  easy.  Weeks  passed  be- 
fore I  found  a  family  in  an  East-side  tene- 
ment that  just  filled  the  requirements.  It 
was  Christmas  Eve,  and,  while  I  stayed  to 
look  them  over,  I  came  to  love  them,  the 
good  children  and  the  brave  little  woman 
fighting  her  fight  all  unaided.  She  told 
me  that  she  was  a  scrub-woman  in  a  public 
building ;  but  it  was  not  until  I  had  gone 
half  way  over  to  the  office,  to  tell  my  friend 
on  the  telephone  that  I  had  found  what  he 
sought,  that  I  thought  of  asking  where  she 
scrubbed.     I  went  back  to  ask  her. 

And  where  was  it,  do  you  think?  In 
the  mission  building,  on  his  floor !  Be- 
tween them  was  just  the  thickness  of  the 
oaken  door,  all  the  time  she  had  been 
needing  him  as  he  did  her,  and  neither 
knew  where  to  find  the  other.     They  were 


190       Our  Grip  on  the  To-Morrau) 

neighbors  in  veiy  truth,  and  they  did  not 
know  it. 

It  may  be  that  your  neighbor  lives  as 
near  to  you,  in  want  of  much  that  you  can 
give,  your  love  and  friendship  first  and 
last.  Go  and  seek  him.  And  when  you 
have  found  him,  bind  up  his  wounds,  help 
him  and  care  for  him ;  and,  when  you 
must  depart  on  the  morrow,  leave  of  your 
substance  that  he  may  be  cared  for  until 
you  come  that  way  again.  That  was  neigh- 
borliness  as  the  Good  Samaritan  saw  it. 

"  Go,"  said  the  Saviour,  "  go,  and  do  thou 
likewise." 


jm 


^68 


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